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Orange County <br />Needs Assessment Project <br />Page 6 <br />Example: The Finance department receives numerous requests for information from both <br />internal and external customers. Without a flexible reporting tool, the gathering of this <br />information is usually a manual process. One such report is the County's Comprehensive <br />Annual Financial Report (CAFR). Most financial software packages, designed for the <br />government sector, contain either a shell of the CAFR report or provide enough <br />t]exibility for its creation. The current manual creation of this report requires a <br />tremendous amount of manual research and keying of data, and greatly increases the <br />probability of errors within this report. <br />E. Batch processing <br />Processing for these business applications is performed using a batch mode. Numerous <br />trarisactians are entered, grouped into a batch, and submitted for processing. This process <br />offers multiple opportunities for. delays in posting. The time required for gathering a <br />batch Of transactions, processing the batch, and correcting errors can be lengthy. <br />Therefore, the longer the processing period, the greater the probability that reported <br />information is inaccurate. <br />Example: All departments regularly perform queries on the system to view account <br />balances, determine budget balances, verify personnel changes, etc. If a department <br />submits a batch and runs a report before the batch has been processed, the report will not <br />reflect the latest information. The accounts payable system .may not reflect a vendor <br />payment that has been made. The personnel system may not show changes to employee <br />records. Purchase orders may not be approved because budget adjustments have not been <br />processed. Each inaccurate report or inquiry increases the County's inefficiency and <br />potential exposure to liability. <br />