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By Luz Davila & Keith Jarboe, Governmentwide Accounting Modernization Program (GWAMP)

One of the long standing promises made by the Governmentwide Accounting (GWA) Modernization Program to any organization willing to put forth the effort to become a GWA Reporter, has been to provide a near real-time turnaround in presenting the impact of that organization’s submitted transactions to their Fund Balance with Treasury (FBWT) position. On July 1, 2009, this promise was fulfilled with the deployment of the GWA Provisional Account Statement which provides GWA Reporters with a daily updated view of their FBWT reflecting all transactions submitted with valid GWA Treasury Account Symbol/Business Event Type Code (TAS/BETC) combinations.       

Our Commissioner, Dave Lebryck, has described the Provisional Account Statement as “an important milestone for GWAMP as it takes us one step closer to information timeliness and accuracy to support improved financial analysis and decision–making. This change gives those agencies who report the “GWA way” an opportunity to perform a daily reconciliation of transactions and balances.”

As mentioned, this release has been dubbed the Provisional Account Statement as it provides a new balance type option for all available reports permitting official GWA Reporters to see a daily updated (albeit provisional) view of their FBWT. This information is labeled as provisional because, while the GWA Reporter submitted transactions have been run through all available edits and validations within the GWA System, at the time of presentation (within the GWA Provisional Account Statement Reports) the transactions have not yet been posted to the current Treasury System of Record (STAR). Provisional Transaction and Balance reports will be available to all GWA account statement users and will be presented for the current calendar month only.

The level of detail presented for provisional transactions is at a more granular level than that which is provided for the accounting and published balance views in the Account Statement. Provisional transaction and balance information is based on the daily activity files processed by the GWA Central Accounting Front End (Café) component. These files consist of the daily submitted Intra-Governmental Payment and Collection (IPAC), collection, and payment transactions submitted by official GWA Reporters with TAS and BETC. Provisional transaction and balance displays are updated on a daily basis to give GWA Reporters the latest information available regarding their FBWT position. Prior to July 2009, daily submitted GWA Reporter transactions were stored, packaged, and transmitted to STAR on behalf of the reporting agency location code (ALC) by GWA during the month-end reporting cycle. Those packaged transaction submissions appeared on the GWA Account Statement in the form of summarized items as if the GWA Reporter had submitted them on a regular 224. Using the new Provisional Balance Display option permits GWA reporters to see the individual transactions that will be packaged at month-end and submitted on their behalf. This affords GWA Reporters an opportunity to perform a daily reconciliation of individually submitted transactions and their associated balances.

Additional download functionality has also been introduced as part of the Provisional Account Statement. The new download options permit all GWA account statement users to customize the amount of information contained in the output files to suit their individual accounting, reconciliation, and reporting needs. Users are now afforded the opportunity to create custom download templates that can be stored and reused as needed providing an ad-hoc style reporting functionality never before available within any GWA system reporting component.

Looking ahead to late 2009, the GWAMP is planning to introduce the new GWA reclassification component. This new functionality will provide full GWA Reporters (those no longer needing to submit a month-end Statement of Transactions) the opportunity to use an online GWA transaction component to accomplish all reclassification activity formerly submitted via Section 1 of their GWA-224 submission. Once implemented, full GWA Reporters will no longer be permitted to submit a monthly GWA-224 report thus effectively transforming their accounting and reporting procedures from a monthly to a daily process.

In conclusion, the GWAMP is extremely excited about the new Provisional Account Statement and pending reclassification components. We view these two releases as critical deliveries of promises that have been made to those organizations who have undertaken the difficult steps of transforming their accounting and reporting processes to become GWA Reporters. We look forward to working with our current GWA Reporters as they begin utilizing these new GWA modules and hope that these new functionalities encourage other organizations to begin transitioning towards becoming GWA Reporters.

To learn more about how your agency can become a GWA Reporter, contact Luz Davila at 202-874-8599 or luz.davila.lopez@fms.treas.gov.

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