Groundswell Integrated Budget Suite (GIBS) - Planning

Overview

Budget planning is paramount for federal organizations. This process serves as the foundation for ensuring that funds are strategically allocated, priorities are well-defined, and resources are optimally utilized to serve the public interest. By managing the budget planning phase effectively, organizations can anticipate future challenges and set a clear roadmap for both short-term and long-term objectives.

Federal organizations currently face significant impediments with existing budget planning solutions. Existing systems often address only the immediate fiscal year ahead without capturing out-year requirements. This short-term perspective undermines the ability of agencies to effectively plan. Another pivotal limitation is the systems' inability to accommodate multiple scenarios. Given the federal budget landscape, where organizations frequently operate under continuing resolutions, seek additional funds through budget justifications, or face challenges like sequestration, a multi-scenario planning capability is indispensable.

The culmination of these challenges and others manifests in several adverse outcomes: loss of control over funding allocations, year-end financial fallouts, and a compromised capacity to report accurately on budgetary matters. Collectively, these issues underscore a pressing need for a more integrated, forward-looking, and flexible budget planning framework for federal organizations. Groundswell’s GIBS-Planning addresses these challenges, offering a unified approach for a more agile, integrated, and strategic federal budget planning.

Key Features & Functionality

Groundswell's Integrated Budget Suite (GIBS) – Planning offers a transformative approach to budget planning for federal organizations, adeptly tackling its challenges. Within GIBS Planning, users manage portfolios and budgets that represent their organizational structure or mission priorities and create budget scenarios with comprehensive spend plans that align funding to planned expenditures and proactively plan for staff and vacancies.

• Unified Budget Creation: Aligns budget projections with strategic plans by breaking them down by program, organization, and/or object classes.
• Comprehensive Line Items Creation: Enhances the creation and linkage of budget line items to spend plans for accurate funding alignment and object class categorization, providing a comprehensive snapshot of each item's budgetary status, funding levels, and supported activities.
• Funding Stream Management: Handles various funding types and anticipates future streams.
• Long-Term Forecasting: Offers out-year budgeting capabilities for multi-year programs.
• Integration Ready: Has the capability to integrate with core agency systems or function as a standalone application.
• Scenario Creation: Flexibility to address various fiscal planning situations—such as continuing resolutions, President’s Budget (PB) amounts, sequestrations, budget increases, and new initiatives—while also strategically planning for future fiscal years.
• Purposeful Reporting: Provides intuitive built-in reports for analyzing spend plans, evaluating mechanisms, comparing scenarios, examining staffing, and scrutinizing tags and workflow analytics. Offers in-line filtering options for tailored data dashboards.
• Staff Planning: Enables precise budget alignment for staff, including splitting across multiple budgets and adjustments for staff details. Automates salary and benefits calculations through

Benefits & Business Impact

• Enhanced Flexibility: Allows for various budget scenarios, both from a fiscal posture and an organizational alignment perspective.
• Streamlined Integrations: Centralizes financial data access by integrating with the full landscape of obligation systems, avoiding scattered platform navigation.
• Efficient Oversight: Provides structured workflows from operational resource managers to the budget office.
• Holistic Planning: Bridges the divide between Agency budget formulation and execution for coherent transitions.
• Intuitive User Interface: An intelligent UI/UX that provides budget-based insights by contextually presenting data visualizations and actionable steps where users are most likely to need them.