Government entities are constantly looking for ways to save money and improve their processes for managing public expenditure, but it can be difficult to know where to start. Without an effective public expenditure management system in place, governments struggle with waste, inefficiencies, and a lack of transparency. FreeBalance’s (PEM) Public Expenditure Management solution is designed to help public sector entities manage their finances more effectively.
What is Public Expenditure Management?
Public expenditure management is an essential part of good governance and public administration. It creates a transparent system for managing public finances, prevents waste and mismanagement, and supports economic growth. Efficiently managing public expenditure helps governments to deliver on their national development plans and improve citizen wellbeing. Public Expenditure Management focuses on outcomes and sees expenditures as a means to produce outputs which are needed to achieve desired outcomes.
How Does FreeBalance Improve Public Expenditure Management?
Public expenditure management systems, such as the FreeBalance Accountability Suite™, are designed to help both national and local governments to save time and money whilst also improving operational efficiencies. With these tools in place, government agencies can effectively manage their budgets and ensure that tax payer dollars are being used correctly.
The (PEM) Public Expenditure Management modules of the FreeBalance Accountability Suite™ provide a fully integrated and unified solution for managing public expenditure. The solution offers a range of features including expenditures and purchasing, electronic procurement, and grants and social payments. Due to the unique needs of government – including budget and commitment controls – this exceeds typical accounts payable functionality common in the private sector, making traditional ERP systems unsuitable for public expenditure management.
How Does FreeBalance’s Public Expenditure Management Solution Improve Government Procurement?
FreeBalance’s Government Resource Planning (GRP) solution for Public Expenditure Management helps government agencies to significantly improve their procurement processes. This includes automating the entire procure-to-pay cycle, from issuing a purchase order all the way through to invoice payment and reconciliation. With this level of automation, governments are able to reduce processing costs, cut down on paperwork, and ensure complete compliance with applicable regulations.
Perhaps even more importantly, FreeBalance’s solution includes a web portal that brings full transparency to a government’s procurement process. The (PEEP) eProcurement Site module helps to build trust in government by giving citizens, vendors, donors and the media the ability to monitor every step of the procurement process to ensure that taxpayers’ money is being spent efficiently.
How Does FreeBalance’s Public Expenditure Management System Work?
FreeBalance’s (PEM) Public Expenditure Management solution is a fully unified procurement management system that can be deployed across the entire public sector – central government, autonomous / decentralized agencies and municipalities – and is configured to comply with all of the government’s procurement regulations and practices.
For low value, high volume goods and services procured, the (PEPR) Purchasing and Expenditure module provides all the required functionality, from the Purchase Requisition up to the Purchase Order and Goods Received Notes. The system is fully integrated with the (PFPF) Core Public Financials module in order to provide the three-way match procurement process and the (PEPM) Payment Management module initiates payment processes and collection management by expense voucher from any source.
For procurement events that are classified as high value, the (PEGP) Electronic Government Procurement module provides all the necessary functionality to implement all business processes related to procurement including a documents library, Request for Proposals, Expressions of Interest, the definition / configuration of various automatic evaluation processes for different bid requirements (administrative, technical, financials, etc.) as well as all vendor communication and the full bid award process.
The (PEEP) eProcurement Site module automatically populates the portal with all information related to the above mentioned procurement processes and provides full transparency to the government’s procurement processes.
The procurement modules are all integrated with the (PECT) Catalogue Management module which creates workspaces for procurement with an unlimited number of supplier catalogues for goods and/or services.
Once a vendor is selected, the (PECM) Contract Management module automatically pulls in all data related to the procurement in order to control and monitor the contract/s generated. This enables the government to monitor contract milestones, deliverables, and contract warranty information.
Furthermore, as standard functionality, all procurement and contract modules of the FreeBalance Accountability Suite™ are budget aware and all of the government’s financial and fiscal controls are applied.
Conclusion
FreeBalance‘s (PEM) Public Expenditure Management solution provides governments with an intuitive, unified system for managing all of their procurement processes. The end-to-end system automates manual steps to save time and money while increasing transparency through the eProcurement portal. Governments can be sure they are in compliance with applicable regulations while operating more efficiently than ever before.
To find out how FreeBalance can help improve Public Expenditure Management in your country, please get in touch.