IFMP Continues….The Budget Formulation Module - Working Towards "One NASA"

The Integrated Financial Management Program (IFMP) is a NASA-wide effort to modernize the Agency's financial and administrative systems and processes. The Goddard Space Flight Center and other NASA Centers are now using the NASA Staffing and Recruitment System (NASA STARS), Position Description Management (PDM), Core Financial (CF), and Travel Manager (TM). Preparations are progressing to implement the latest module, Budget Formulation (BF).

The mission of the Budget Formulation Module is to design and implement a single integrated Agency-wide budget formulation process/system. Identified as a "One NASA" tool, it has the capacity for bottoms up formulation of institutional, program, enterprise, and Agency-level budget formulation requirements. It will also support top down decision-making, link supporting data to the resources estimates, and redistribute top down decisions back through the bottoms up formulation as a basis for operating plans and future budget formulation cycles.

The Budget Formulation system will support six stages of the budget cycle including the Pre-Program Operating Plan (POP), Center POP, Enterprise Review, Agency POP, OMB Release and Congressional Budget.

The benefits of the Budget Formulation system to NASA include: standard and efficient processes to provide budget data for management analysis and reporting; timely, consistent and reliable information for management decisions; the integration of budget data with the Core Financial Module to support budget execution; a consistent source of information to facilitate sharing of data across the various levels of NASA; full cost management; and, improved NASA accountability.

"The Budget Formulation system facilitates full cost activities, particularly the allocation of pools done today by offline spreadsheets," said Joanne Sprunk, BF Project Manager. She added, "Budget Formulation is another step towards the achievement of our 'One NASA' goal. It will provide the capability to plan from the bottom up, through the entire Budget Cycle to the Congressional Budget, with drill-down capability to the lowest level of detail."

There will be two Budget Formulation releases. The first release - Release 0.5 - is scheduled for October 2003 and will support the Agency budget process. The second release - Release 1.0 - is scheduled for February 2004 and will include the ability to do guideline distribution and top down changes (Headquarters' functionality).

Training for end users will begin in September 2003. Additional information on training is forth coming.

For more information on Budget Formulation, access the IFMP Website at http://www.ifmp.nasa.gov.

*Note: This article was adopted from KSFC