Jennifer Maguire, Director, Department of FISCal
Over the past year, we have continued to make progress on our roadmap of activities, and are well under way in achieving our 2024 goals. We have made great strides, including successfully completing the onboarding of the California Department of Technology and the Department of Rehabilitation to the FI$Cal system. The task of onboarding requires coordination among our teams, our partner agencies and the onboarding departments. It also requires a tremendous commitment of time and resources to ensure departments are ready to begin transacting in the system.
Once onboarding is complete, we continue to support and track departments’ activities. We know that new departments experience a three-year learning curve. The data gathered from tracking departments’ activities enables us to understand their pain points and successes, and provides valuable insight so we can achieve our goal to maintain a modern system and outstanding customer service.
As part of this data, we are pleased to see that departments transacting in the FI$Cal system continue to improve in closing their books timely year-over-year. Since 2019, departments have improved by nearly 25% at the same point in time in previous years. By early August 2019, 74.9% of departments had closed their books for the FY 18/19. The same time five years later, that number was 98.4% for FY 23/24!
There are many reasons we see these improvements in departments’ closing their books more quickly and efficiently over the years. This includes the support we provide to departments to ensure their readiness before they onboard to the system, the continued support once they are transacting in the system, and departments’ maturity in the system over time.
Before onboarding, our teams work with departments to complete a fit-gap analysis, develop a Master Departmental Workplan, and provide dedicated support. Departments are given access to the system early on in the process, participating in configuration and validations sessions, and working through their processes in test environments to learn the ins-and-outs of the system.
After a department officially goes live in the FI$Cal system, support doesn’t stop there. Each department receives one-on-one help in transacting in the system through the completion of their financial statements, in order to connect their previous processes with the new. Departments are also assigned a functional sponsor, to ensure that most service tickets are resolved the same day. In addition, FI$Cal has implemented enhancements and guardrails in the system to decrease the chance of errors. We do rely on departments to be open to and take full advantage of our support and our extensive training options.
Maturity in the system – the time the system end user spends learning how to resolve issues and complete month-end close tasks directly in the system independently – also contributes to departments’ success in closing their books timely. Ultimately, departments must remain committed within their own teams to set up processes, train and hire capable staff, and fully engage in improving their outcomes.
In order to ensure these trends continue, the Department of FISCal (FI$Cal) continues to reach out for feedback. Earlier this year, we engaged a contractor to survey FI$Cal end users. The purpose of the survey was to determine the ease of use of the system by end users and their satisfaction with accounting, cash management, procurement and budgeting functionality. This assessment also sought recommendations from the departments to FI$Cal on process, policy and system improvements that would assist the departments in submitting timely annual financial statements.
Among the survey results, we saw a strong positive association with our direct support services. 94% of users reported satisfaction with FI$Cal Service Center services, and 96% of users reported satisfaction with FI$Cal Learning Center services. In the coming months, our team will use the data gathered in these surveys to make improvements in the system and how we serve the needs of our customer departments.
In addition to our user support options, we continue to partner with the State Controller’s Office (SCO) to support the transition of the accounting book of record to the FI$Cal system. Once this transition is complete, it will create efficiencies that will have positive downstream impacts on departments’ abilities to submit timely financial statements. We remain committed to our collaboration efforts with SCO in this transition and look forward to becoming the official accounting book of record for the state of California.
Our customer departments will remain at the forefront as we continue to work on our roadmap activities. We rely on our end users to inform the improvements to both the system, and the ways we help departments improve their own functions, but we can’t do it alone. Our partner agencies and system end users must remain committed and diligent in closing their books on time. The good news is that we are seeing major progress and expect to see these positive trends continue into the future.