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New Bar|Scan Features
GASB 34
What is GASB 34 and how
can Bar|Scan assist me in meeting GASB 34 Requirements?
GASB is the Governmental Accounting
Standards Board, which monitors the financial reporting methods for state and
local governments. 34 refers to Statement No. 34: Basic Financial
Statements-and Management's Discussion and Analysis-for State and Local
Governments, in effect since 1979.
In June 1999, the GASB proposed
significant changes to Statement No. 34. The new initiative, known at GASB 34,
intends to better reflect the way the current infrastructure is accounted for,
thereby making financial reporting easier and more comprehensive for today's
state and local government agencies.
GASB 34 will have a dramatic effect on the
way government does financial reporting, specifically in areas such as Budget
Process and Asset/Maintenance Management.
Bar|Scan makes it easy to add
categories/catalogs to reflect infrastructure assets that are not currently
being capitalized and tracked. The Accounting Module allows tracking of
depreciation history across funds/organizations/fixed asset accounts.
Bar|Scan's depreciation can be used for estimating future depreciation
expenses. The User Defined Fields module can be used to add custom fields and
easily report on them. Our Report Generator makes accounting reports easy to
build and reconcile and our Imaging module can link photos to assets of various
infrastructure.
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JFMIP
The Joint Financial
Management Improvement Program.
The JFMIP is a coordinated undertaking of
several branches of the US Government. The purpose of JFMIP is to improve the
financial management practices of the Government. It is not necessarily a
standard benchmark against which software is evaluated. JFMIP acknowledges that
complete functionality does not necessarily reside in a single software
application or system. In fact, JFMIP states 'property information may reside
in or may be calculated in a number of applications or systems'.
Because Bar|Scan meets most of the
mandatory requirements of the Property Management System component of the
Government's Agency Systems Architecture, it can be the cornerstone of an
Agencies' Property Management System.
For more information on using Bar|Scan to
meet your requirements, review the guideline "Property Management Systems
Requirements", code JFMIP-SR-00-4, available for download from
www.jfmip.gov and
call us to discuss your specific needs.
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Company Wide Access To Your Bar|Scan
Asset Information
More and more companies are using the Internet and
Wide Area Networks to share information on a national and global
basis.
Bar|Scan has solutions for both of these
technologies. For Internet and Intranet users, we have developed a Bar|Scan
HTML Viewer. For Wide Area Networks, Bar|Scan now incorporates a company
database synchronization feature.
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Internet Access
If you need to
view your company assets from any location, or would like to provide asset
information to other people outside of your core user group, then our Bar|Scan
HTML viewer is for you. Using any popular browser such as Microsoft Explorer or
Netscape Navigator, you can have access to your Bar|Scan asset information in
real-time from anywhere in the world.
You can also provide Bar|Scan asset
information to a wide group of users. Since most users are already familiar
with obtaining information through the web, little end-user training is
required. If these users already have Internet or Intranet access then no
additional software is required on their personal computers.
Once the user enters their password into
the Bar|Scan HTML Viewer, he or she can view or print the asset information in
a variety of sorts and filters.
Since the Bar|Scan HTML Viewer uses ODBC
technology to access your Bar|Scan database in real time, there is no need to
maintain a separate database or perform exports. And, once set up, the whole
process is fully automated.
For existing Bar|Scan customers, all of
the required software required is free* of charge as long as you have a server
in your organization running Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 or better. Should
you have special requirements, our programmers can customize the Bar|Scan HTML
Viewer for you quickly and can upload it directly to your web site.
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Company Synchronization
One of
the most powerful and exciting features of Bar|Scan is its ability to
synchronize data from widely separated physical locations. For example, let us
say that a company headquartered in California wants to keep track of its
assets on a worldwide basis. It has offices in Taiwan, Great Britain, Germany
and South Africa. Each of these offices wants to independently track their own
data using the Bar|Scan system, yet Headquarters wants a consolidated database
for worldwide inventory reporting. Can it be done? Of course!
Utilizing an existing virtual private
network (VPN) over in-house communications facilities or the internet, each
office could locally set up and maintain its own inventory, yet Headquarters
can query those local databases for additions, changes and deletions, then
assign this information to a headquarters copy of each office's database or
even to a consolidated database containing the data from all offices, or both!
These databases can then be queried with the full power of Bar|Scan's reporting
facilities for timely inventory control and valuation.
Synchronization for the above mentioned
consolidated reporting is done in one direction only, from the remote office to
headquarters, but Bar|Scan also supports two way synchronization when the
databases on each side of the synchronization are meant to be exact images of
each other. In this case it is possible to make changes one end of the data
being moved and have those changes reflected at the other end! What are the
details of how this is done? Bar|Scan utilizes a unique snapshot imaging
process that helps to accurately track additions, changes and deletions on both
sides of the synchronization. |
