Strike up the Band and Join the [FM] Chorus

Date: November 16, 2018

In financial management, we use interfaces to exchange data to and from the core financial management system. If you think of data elements as the notes and financial management processes as the rhythm and tempo, government agencies today would have a fairly discordant sound.

As a community, we are not harmonious in the way we exchange financial data, leading to disparate interfaces that interfere with adoption of shared systems and lead to costly inefficiencies.

That is going to change!

The Financial Management Working Group, under the support of the Financial Management Standards Committee, is developing a better arrangement. The working group plans to look at six of the most common interfaces – purchase cards, payroll, e-invoicing, travel, grants payments/drawdowns, and grants management – to agree on fundamentals, define consensus, and publish results in the summer of 2019. This is a solid first step in standardizing the data and encouraging the federal financial management community to play from the same sheet of music.

Let’s work together – join the [FM] chorus – to produce needed results!