FEDERAL PURCHASE CARD MANAGEMENT

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:

• The government health facility could not challenge certain purchases that the bank claimed were made
• It was cumbersome for the data to be transferred to the accounting system
• 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.

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.

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.