From Days to Just Minutes: Improved FFATA Reporting Saves Over $11,000 Annually

Darrell Johnson, Division of Accounting and Finance

Posted: June 27, 2013

What was improved, briefly

The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT’s) Office of Financial Management and Budget (OFMB) and the Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) partnered to streamline a time-consuming function, regarding reporting requirements from the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA).  Previously, this function required several staff-days of effort every month at CDOT. Now, that same function requires just a few minutes, savings staff time that is worth over $11,000 per year. Read on for more details!

Background

Since 2010, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) has required CDOT to provide reporting about all sub-recipients of various Federal grants. CDOT has been updating the FFATA Sub-award Reporting System (FSRS) to meet these requirements.

This FFATA reporting requires project-level, contractor-level and federal obligation transaction-level reporting -- this totals to thousands of actions each year.  In prior years, CDOT had been complying with these mandates by manually updating the FSRS record transmittals. This has required several staff-days per month of accounting data download, analysis and report formulation.

CDOT and FFATA logos

As part of CDOT’s efforts become more effective, efficient and elegant, CDOT and the Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) partnered on a Project to improve this situation.  The objective of this Project focused on streamlining the process: 1) reduce or eliminate the manual data activities and record correction process, and 2) provide electronic systematic reporting with a daily reporting capability.

This improvement project produced a new “transaction” in our SAP computer system, which called the transaction “ZF100”. This new transaction allows CDOT to comply with the Federal sub-recipient reporting requirements in a much more efficient, consistent and accurate manner. Additionally, as FFATA detailed data reporting requirements increase for future years, this transaction has already been programmed to report those additional elements.

This activity previously required several staff-days of effort every month of accounting data download, analysis, and report formulation. Now, this is an activity which is processed virtually within minutes – saving a lot of time and headache in the process!!

With the introduction of the ZF100 transaction, OFMB Managers, Accountants, and Budget Analyst are no longer impacted on a daily basis by the need to reconcile and review manual FFATA report queries and submissions. This has resulted in savings in staff time of approximately $11,000 per year.