The project included developing an integrated, concise and detailed project and reporting system that tracks sources of funds and provides budget, expenditure, encumbrances and balance information to project managers, department managers, and governmental reporting agencies.

Corybant worked with division and manager stakeholders in the agency to define policy and reporting requirements and then designed and implemented a system for integrating information from COFRS (i.e. Budget, Expenses, Encumbrances, and Revenues) and other third-party on-site applications. The system includes a methodology for allocating a variety of shared expenses to individual business units based on FTE, square footage, facility, or a combination of factors and type of shared expense.

Corybant developed a web-based system with user Role-Based access to integrated reports, online purchase requests, and other system features (upload data sets and extract processed data sets).

Over the course of the project Corybant has prepared several reports and presentations for the Finance and Audit Committee of the History Colorado Board of Directors. Corybant has also prepared training documentation and trained 30 History Colorado Staff and Managers in the operation of the system.

History Colorado’s financial reporting system requirements include State Appropriations, Federal Grants, Fiscal Operations, and Donor Contributions. As a result, there are multiple data sources including COFRS, Peachtree, Raiser’s Edge, Excel, and others. Reports are extracted from the appropriate data sources and uploaded into DPRS by authorized History Colorado staff on a monthly basis or as often as desired. The following pages contain screenshots for some of the features and functionality of the DPRS.

DPRS Roles and User Views Screenshots

User roles are set up for each DPRS user based on their requirements. Each user has a unique user name and login. The view they see will depend on their rights and privileges.

Management Services – System Features

For the purposes of this document we will use the screenshots for the DPRS Admin User (below).

Line of Business, Department, Business Unit and Trackodes

• History Colorado is broken down into four (4) Line of Business (LOB’s)
• Museum Operations
• Preservation
• Regional Museums
• Shared Services
• Each LOB has LOB Departments such as “Education” or “SHF”
• Each LOB Department has one or more Business Units, such as “Atrium”
• A Trackcode is the name for the concatenation of FUND, APPR, ORG and PROG from COFRS.
• Each Trackcode is assigned to a single Business Unit

Operating Reports – Line of Business and Operating Budget Reports

The following is a screenshot that shows the navigation screen to the Line of Business and Operating Budget Reports. Reports are available for each Line of Business, Department and Business Unit (i.e. program). Users can filter reports by selecting specific funds or even Business units they want.

Below is a summary of the differences between the Line of Business report and the Operating Reports. These reports include current year, prior year, and in some cases future budgeted year. The reports are expandable to show additional detail, for example the user can click on a line item or number to see a drill down of the dataset that number or line item is comprised of.

Operating Budget and example of a drilldown

Authorized users can select any drill downs and copy and paste them into an excel spreadsheet.

LOB Report and navigating drill downs

The LOB report includes a section for Shared Expenses which is an allocation of the shared expenses for to each Business Unit

Online Purchase Request

One of the newest features of the DPRS is the Online Purchase Request. Using this tool, users can complete a purchase request online based on the budget they have available for a particular Trackcode or account in COFRS. The information is based on the last COFRS update as well as pending Online Purchase Requests that have not been processed through COFRS yet.

Options for printing and saving Online Printed Purchase Request

Example of a Printed Purchase Request

Example of reconciling reports with data extracts from DPRS

The following shows an example of a report from DPRS and four (4) extracts available from DPRS. In this case, the dataset extracts serve as drill-downs to gain additional information about the numbers reflected in the report. Red = History Colorado Budget Revenue, Green = COFRS Actual Revenue, Blue = COFRS Budget Expenses, and Purple = COFRS Actual Expenses.

Upload Files and Datasets

DPRS Data sets include COFRS, Peachtree, Raisers Edge, and manually created Revenue Budget from History Colorado staff.

Extracting Data Sets – Authorized Users Only

Authorized users can extract datasets which will be emailed directly to their email as attachment.

Evaluate and recommend potential Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Software packages

Corybant was also engaged by History Colorado to evaluate and recommend potential Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Software packages that can provide consolidated reporting for 8-to-10 Operating Divisions, to be integrated with the Detailed Project and Reporting System used by History Colorado.

This project was executed in three phases: a formal fact finding (Needs Assessment) phase to document division needs, a Requirements Study phase to synthesize the requirements and Business Needs, and an evaluation phase to identify implementation options and to make recommendations.

We began with a list of over 650 COTS Accounting Software packages. Only 70 of those packages included the basic requirements for an Accounts Receivable Module and an Invoicing Module. Of those, 41 packages were proprietary stand-alone accounting systems that require installation on a single desktop computer with a single user access using older versions of desktop operating systems, like Windows NT or Windows XP. An additional 17 systems were discarded because they were for high-end or large-scale corporations and required sophisticated network systems. Our evaluation focused on the remaining 12 systems. A further analysis of the capabilities of the vendors resulted in identifying 4 vendor solutions that met the requirements of History Colorado.

After evaluating the various purchase options (Hosted Solution, VPN, Software-as-a-Service or SAAS) Corybant presented its recommendation in a series of three formal reports that were presented to History Colorado along with a full detailed analysis of the basis for our recommendation.