Welcome to the GovernERP Project

Features For Modern Management

Designed for Government

Government requires flexible budgeting that can be configured to constrain accounting system expenditures. By "flexible budgeting" we mean allowing groups to work on various parts, allowing versioning and supporting aggregation of the pieces/versions to create a final budget. We also want to support budgeting as a "social process" -- more on that below.

Government is constrained in budgeting and expenditures by its funding sources. Funding sources, in turn, can have rules as to what those funds can be used for. Sometimes the limits are by program, sometimes by expense category, sometimes both and sometimes something else entirely. The point here is that we intend to design a system that can be configured for these types of rules. Most commercial off-the-shelf, COTS, software packages have inadequate native support for these types of features.

Procurement is another process where government regulations dictate software system features that are different than what private sector business normally implement. Typical practice would require workflows with various levels of permissions based on constraints of budget, expense category, expense amount, etc.

In larger governmental organizations there may be a need to view purchasing at unit, program, department, agency and global levels.

The wide variety and special nature of governmental billing systems ultimately defeats integrated solutions. GovernERP Project is taking a two pronged approach -- create an clearly documented interface for external billing systems to both general ledger and accounts receivable systems that exposes all the power a native billing package would enjoy and create a billing system framework that could easily be extended to handle most billing requirements.

Fully Integrated Cost Accounting

This is a much desired feature for any integrated accounting/ERP system to possess. Like many popular check box items, it is one thing say the words cost accounting, but it's another to implement it correctly. This is clearly seen in many of the systems on the market today with only a couple of systems doing it right.

Cost accounting is the ability to look at income and expense by project or program where revenues and expenses cross traditional organizational silos. Whether referred to as cost centers, profit centers, projects, enterprises, or programs, the end result is to gauge performance of said "thing". Performance of managers, units, programs, basically anything outside traditional reporting boundries.

To achieve integrated costing one and preferrably two elements have to be added to transactions -- cost center and activity. This implies that a system *should* be designed from the ground up to support cost accounting. GovernERP is being designed with these requirements in mind.

Budgeting Process Support

In addition to the budgeting features mentioned earlier, we have recognized that the process of budget creation is a team process requiring many departments and units within departments to work together. Our intention is to develop the budgeting piece to support versioning and enable the users to communicate by attaching comments or working notes with budget elements. We will allow budgets to be based on prior budgets, prior actual, developed from a blank slate and/or come from above in a highly summarized form to be detailed at the department/unit level. In addition, the budget reporting will allow for multiple levels of detail from the lowest to highest.

What Does Web 2.0 Support Mean?

In the simplest terms, if web 1.0 meant static or barely dynamic web sites, then 2.0 implies very sophisticated behaviors closing the gap between the old web and modern software applications. Terms like AJAX, RSS and Atom feeds, mashups, dashboards and many other acronyms and buzz-words are used when talking about Web 2.0. The GovernERP Project is using technologies that enable all of these types of features or make them trivial to add.

Social Application Support

We've mentioned the need for workflow support and communication support in the GovernERP Project. What has been recognized in the Web 2.0 world is that almost all processes, including those in ERP/accounting systems, are fundementally group endeavours and require features that make it easier for team members to communicate between themselves and with other teams that they interact with. This sort of communication needs to be tied to the underlying business process. Beyond interaction support would be user created documentation, wiki and other such elements. Naturally all features could be hidden or enabled administratively, but we feel that these kinds of features will be hallmarks of software in the future.

Modular

GovernERP Project is divided into modules some of which are optional. For more details on GovernERP modules, follow this link.