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| Challenge: |
A Federal government organization was having problems reconciling its government purchase card (p-cards) purchases with the bank providing
the credit card service. P-cards were issued to authorized individuals of the government facility to do micro-purchases that were typically under $2,500.00. As
a result, issues arouse, such as:
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The government health facility could not challenge certain purchases that the bank claimed were made |
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It was cumbersome for the data to be transferred to the accounting system |
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The reports on the p-card purchases were inaccurate and lacked the timely representation of the charges |
In addition, this made it difficult to identify purchases that could potentially be fraudulent.
Starry Associates recognized that there was a huge void in terms of managing the purchase cards transactions. As a result, internal funds were invested to
design and develop commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) that would assist this government agency in managing and auditing its p-card purchases and
transactions. The product became know as MACCS®. MACCS® is a web-based, Oracle database, COTS product that offers solutions for invalid purchase tracking,
forgotten disputes, credits not received, lost receipts, illegible or incomplete handwritten entries in logbooks, miss-keyed information, unauthorized and
unmanaged spending, hard to reconcile invoices, manual entries of funding codes on the invoices, incomplete accounting report late payments to the bank, and
the lack of an audit trail.
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| Solution: |
Starry Associates identified this as an opportunity to assist the government in providing solutions for these issues. Starry Associates
designed and developed a web-based solution so that the cardholders and approvers could manage their purchase transactions from their computer. The MACCS®
solution has allowed our client to manage the agency's purchase card transactions and pay the bank invoice timely. Starry Associates has been tasked to add
features and to modify MACCS® to accommodate change requests from both the bank and the Government Agency that Starry Associates was contracted.
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| Benefit: |
Within two months after MACCS® was implemented and became operational, the government agency received its return on its investment in
rebates for invoices paid to the bank timely. This return on investment, and how Starry Associates implemented the new application, left the government agency
highly satisfied with MACCS®. In addition,MACCS® has since received many favorable results from audit assessors regarding how the MACCS® system has
managed the procurement card transactions.
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