Electronic Transaction Processing

The Client

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is responsible for providing for the mobility of the state’s people, goods, services, and information, including the maintenance of California’s 15,000-mile highway system. The department has more than 20,000 employees and an annual budget of $6 billion.

The Challenge

The Caltrans purchasing card program was designed to simplify the high-volume repetitive purchasing of small-dollar items required by road maintenance employees. With approximately 2,000 purchasing card users statewide, the associated accounting and payment process had become prohibitively paper-based and labor-intensive. The department’s accounting employees had to create and email a separate statement to every user for reconciliation. Cardholders then had to match their documentation—their invoices and their approved purchase request forms—with each item on their statements. Finally, all that paper had to be mailed back to Caltrans’ centralized accounts payable office for entry into the accounting system. A high frequency of disputed charges further delayed the reconciliation process.

In addition to the tedious nature of the process, Caltrans had only 40 days from receipt of its statement to pay its bank. The time-consuming reconciliation process caused the department to continually miss the payment deadline, resulting in interest penalties.

The Solution

Caltrans turned to BearingPoint for help. Our team analyzed Caltrans’ business requirements, then devised comprehensive specifications for a Purchasing Card Accounting and Requisition System (PCARS). The resulting system is an intranet application that enables cardholders to access their bank statements through a web browser and process transactions electronically. PCARS was first implemented as a pilot application to 200 users. As the system evolves, the BearingPoint team will be on hand to modify the system design. According to Jane Gridley, former project manager in Caltrans’ office of fiscal systems, “(BearingPoint) has been extremely responsive to our needs. They really do try to understand our business processes so they can design to meet our needs.”

The Benefits

Thanks to PCARS, Caltrans has reduced paperwork and—more importantly—eliminated the interest penalties associated with late payments. PCARS has enabled Caltrans to realize even more savings by reducing accounting staff requirements since all the data entry and processing is done by the system. Beyond reducing labor requirements and expediting time to payment, PCARS is helping Caltrans enforce fiscal policies and exercise tighter control over the purchasing cards.
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