The Financial Accounting System (FAS) facilitates the departments effectively manage the funds of all Central and State sponsored schemes. Receipt, payment and adjustment vouchers are generated through this web-based software. Various roles and privileges are created for the Accounts Officers and Accountants of each Department. The Departments can monitor fund receipts and expenditure through an integrated view generated by the system.
The Financial Accounting System is a generic fund management applica-tion conceptualized, de-signed and developed by National Informatics Centre, Hy-derabad to effectively solve the ac-counts management problems in Cen-tral & State sponsored schemes. FAS software facilitates in generating all the statutory books of accounts with the help of receipt and payment vouchers entered day to day. The Cashbook is prepared at the end of the transacting day and the system keeps track of the availability of funds. This software will help the departments towards effi-cient fund management of all Central & State sponsored schemes. Receipt, payment and adjustment vouchers are generated through the software. FAS is a web based application acces-sible over net through a secured login/password. Different roles and privileg-es are created for the accounts officers and accountants of the department. The departments will be able to mon-itor the fund receipts and expenditure through an integrated view generated by the system. Higher officials of the department can view and monitor the state level consolidated and scheme level consolidated reports online. SCALABILITY: The established business process and the FAS software is fully fine tuned and even after the concurrent users have accessed the Application, scalability is maintained and the users do not have to face ses-sion related issues. The scope of the software can be increased to imple-ment it in a wide range to new Institu-tions with minimal effort and within a short period of time. SUSTAINABILITY: Most optimal sustenance model with clear defini-tion of roles and responsibilities had been implemented. Effective Moni-toring cells have been put in place to ensure daily use of software yielding desired outcomes and results. Online feedback entry with token generation and automated mail response helps to redress the implementation issues in a faster manner.
HIGHLIGHTS • Workflow based online budget es-timation preparation, submission and sanction • Every component of receipt and payment for a scheme is accounted with the help of strong 7 levels of heads of accounts system, uniform-ly across the departments • Generic software and customizable for any department • Analysis and decision making on releases and expenditure of funds • Awareness and monitoring capa-bilities are expected to be increased for the head of departments on various accounting procedures • Building a strong data bank of fi-nancial information • Manual books of accounts need not be maintained • Preparation of monthly financial progress reports
USER INTERFACE • Menu driven and user friendly in-terface • Entry of Bank, Branch and Open-ing Balances • Entry of Cheque Book • Entry of Receipts & Payments • Adjustments (Settlement of ad-vances) • Bank to Bank Transfers • Entry of Reimbursable advance, Repayment Entries (Contra En-tries) • Entry of Opening balances of Ad-vances (out standing advances) • Integrated Pay Bill Module for sal-ary processing • Bank Scroll, Cheque for DD scroll and Bank Reconciliation • Cashbook, Periodic Cashbook and Ledger • Annual Financial Statements
USER MANAGEMENT The user management module under FAS project Consists of the following major operations:
- Identification of Users
- User ID formation & generation
- Security & Session Management
- User ID intimation
- User locking mechanism
- Roles & Privileges
TRANSFORMATION AND POSITIVE IMPACT Uniform head of accounts across the departments are designed by conduct-ing series of brain storming sessions and interactions with domain experts from the departments • Role based privileges and trans-action modification history made available.
• Generation of unique voucher number for every receipt, payment and adjustment vouchers. • Complete automation of settle-ment of out standing advances and current year advances • Preparation of complete MIS of funds available on web for moni-toring and decision making pro-cess for higher officials • Scheme fund integrated pay bill module for the salary disburse-ment. • Low cost effective solution (wher-ever required open source soft-ware are used) • Java server pages, servlets and MS-SQL as back end database • Application is hosted in Tomcat web server at state of art SAN data centre of NIC Hyderabad free of cost.
BEST PRACTICES ADOPTED Deployment of the software enabled the department to instantly generate all the statutory and non-statutory books of accounts. Since the head of accounts are uniform across the In-stitutions, there is no chance for re-cording expenditure as per the choice. Monthly financial progress reports are generated with a click of button, funds position across the department in the state in all schemes is known in-stantly. State, district and department level consolidated reports are gen-erated for monitoring and decision making processes. Practical approach has been adopted for unique advance settlement when compared to other accounting software.
PRE-DEPLOYMENT VS POST-DEPLOYMENT Prior to the deployment of the software the department used to maintain the accounts manually and various books needed to be referred to find out the release and expenditure details in a particular head of account and prepare a statement. There were repeated occurrences of human erros in writing cash books, ledgers, registers etc., recording the expenditure details in wrong head of accounts. Additionally, the ratification procedures were cumbersome. There was redundancy in work & delay in preparation and communication of monthly financial progress reports to the departments. Deployment of the software enabled the department for instant generation of all the statutory and non statutory books of accounts. Since the head of accounts are uniform across the departments, there is no chance for recording expenditure as per the choice. Monthly financial progress reports are generated with a click of button, funds position across the department in the state in all schemes is known instantly. State, District and Department level consolidated reports are generated for monitoring and decision making processes.
RECOGNITION Financial Accounting System for APT-WREIS has won Bronze Award at the National e-Governance Awards 2012-2013 under the category - “Exemplary Re-Use of ICT Based Solutions”.