ARRA Reporting: Automate Compliance Without Effort or Errors

ARRA Funds Manager

Reporting Requirements Under the ARRA

Funding requirements under the ARRA include unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability. Recipients of federal funding are required to provide quarterly reports for each dollar allocated and spent. They must also provide metrics on job creation and retention as well as program, project, and sub-project performance. Recipients will need to provide this information to federal auditors as well as on public-facing Web sites that incorporate dashboards, geospatial information, and ad hoc reporting. Many fund recipients will be challenged to meet these reporting requirements as they extend well beyond the capabilities of their current financial systems.

Information Builders' Qualifications and Experience With State and Local Financial Reporting

Information Builders' business intelligence (BI) and enterprise integration solutions enable federal, state, and local agencies to consolidate financial information from multiple disparate sources and deliver it in a secure role-based environment. Agency and department administrators and executives can access high-level summary information on how their program's budgets are performing relative to actual expenditures and drill down into line items. Financial analysts can slice and dice information, perform ad hoc analysis, examine trends over time, and perform modeling and budgeting. Program managers can see, in detail, where money is going in the programs they administer. With comprehensive, real-time information at their fingertips, decision-makers can gain complete visibility into the finances of an agency, department, initiative, or program to make more informed financial decisions.

Information Builders' ARRA Fund Manager Solution

To help the recipients of federal funding manage, measure, and report on ARRA funds, Information Builders has created the ARRA Fund Manager. It automates the process of ARRA compliance reporting by integrating and aggregating data from multiple financial systems and delivering it in a useful format to executives, administrators, and the public. The ARRA Fund Manager increases transparency and accountability, monitors funding, tracks key performance indicators, analyzes effectiveness, and provides a platform for public-facing reporting.

Leveraging Information Builders' WebFOCUS, a scalable and robust enterprise business intelligence and reporting platform, the solution includes performance management, dashboards, scorecards, as well as geospatial and ad hoc reporting and analysis. With the ARRA Fund Manager, governors, elected officials, and other executives – who stand to be personally responsible for funds received – can rest assured that they are meeting the mandates of ARRA with requisite compliance reporting while providing transparency and accountability to their citizens and constituents.

• Performance management aligns program and project performance with desired goals, outcomes, and results. Executives and administrators can define goals and outcomes, quantify them as key performance indicators and measures, and communicate them throughout their organizations in dashboards and scorecards. They can link spending to outcomes, such as job creation/retention and track progress over time as well as manage toward desired outcomes.
• Automated compliance reporting enables financial managers to know that funds are properly disbursed and accounted for as separate from regular budget allocations and that reports are available to federal auditors and the public.
• Ad hoc analysis and reporting features enable non-technical end users to perform what-if, historic, trend, or other analysis. Users can create forecasts, budgets and scenarios, as well as track contracts, contractors, and subcontractors.
• A robust, scalable architecture that supports the technical requirements of public-facing applications. Thousands of concurrent users can run reports to see how funds were used, who is responsible for them, what programs were funded, and program results and effectiveness to date.
• Enterprise search capabilities allow users to leverage a familiar and intuitive Google-like interface to instantly access detailed records, unstructured documents, and more. This enables the public and internal staff to search for projects and programs, contractors and subcontractors, contacts and contracts.
• Geospatial reporting with ESRI or Google Maps. Geographical business intelligence enables users to map where program dollars are being spent by type of project.