The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS) has awarded its RFP for a collaborative and comprehensive budget formulation and execution system to Questica. PDS was established as the Legal Aid Agency in 1960 to represent people who couldn’t afford to hire an attorney in criminal, juvenile, and mental health proceedings. A federally funded organization, their mission is “to provide and promote quality legal representation to indigent adults and children facing a loss of liberty in the District of Columbia.” The PDS works hard to make the most effective use of its resources to serve the citizens of the District, within its Congressional-mandate. With over 230 employees and 15 divisions, and a budget of $40.7 million the PDS needed a centralized budget system that was powerful yet user-friendly.
PDS has purchased Questica Budget’s Operating and Salaries modules, which will integrate with their Oracle financial system, providing them with one source for all budget data. Questica Budget will enable PDS to efficiently plan, build, manage and report on all budget and finance activities and related information both for current, and future budget years. Powerful reporting will allow users to generate standard budget documents, as well as on-demand reports. The Salary and Position Planning module will allow PDS to forecast and calculate personnel costs based on full-time positions, part-time positions, and full-time equivalents. Forecasting will allow users to consider any number of scenarios and factors including attrition rate, vacancy rate, hiring lag, projected WIFI cost, and other personnel factors.
As a publicly accountable organization, being transparent about how budgets are developed and spent is critical. With Questica’s Budget Book powered by CaseWare, PDS will now be able to easily create and public a compliant budget book using the data and information from Questica Budget.
