Precision Reconciliation of Official Undistributed Disbursements (PROUD)

The Columbia Group (TCG) has developed a module for its COBRA software suite that will revolutionize the way financial analysts perform research into Official Undistributed Disbursements.

TCG Approach

All disbursements transactions after being paid by the disbursing station (e.g. MOCAS or STARS ONE PAY ) are "registered" with treasury this registration is recorded in the Defense Cash Accounting System (DCAS). Transactions are then fed to the appropriate accounting station (e.g. STARS or STARS-FL) based on the AAA.

Official Undistributed Disbursements, a special type of "Problem Disbursements" reported monthly at a subhead level, is the difference between disbursements reported to Treasury with those reported in the official accounting system.

The amounts disbursed at a subhead level can be made up of thousands of documents and tens of thousands of transactions. The biggest problem facing someone wanting to do this type of research is that the data is not readily available. The detail transaction data for a subhead is only available in stars as an overnight request. So to investigate a problem, the overnight 774 report should be requested. Even with this report, identifying which of those thousands of transactions is causing an out of balance situation is extremely difficult.

Benefits

The COBRA PROUD module allows instant drill down from FY, appropriation, to subhead and then document and voucher comparing the STARS disbursed amounts and the DCAS registered amounts. It allows the user to interactively "Hide" matching or explainable differences so they can focus on the transactions contributing to the out of balance situation.

The system also identifies and color codes "explainable" out of balance transactions (e.g. timing issues where the transaction has already cleared in the current month or situations where the transaction was posted to a different document in DCAS than STARS).

Our tool also integrated the PAYING office data for MOCAS paid contracts giving a third source of data to help determine which amount is correct when DCAS and STARS don.t agree. This saves the analyst from having to go to yet another system.

The system provides direct access to the COMPLETE STARS HISTORY DATA and the COMPLETE DCAS history data via popups for detailed research and analysis. These histories are easily downloadable into excel spreadsheets for convenient research.

The PROUD tool also allows analysts to add annotated bookmarks to particular SUBHEADs for recording what their research has revealed.