About BEACON: Impacted Systems: North Carolina Accounting System (NCAS)

Business Purpose:

The North Carolina Accounting System (NCAS) provides control over the State's fiscal policies and procedures, financial transactions, resource balances, and subsidiary accounts and records through a central general ledger and other uniform information databases. Additionally, NCAS provides financial statements and reports reflecting the current condition of all state agency accounts and assists central managers in maintaining financial control over state government operations.

The State operates its accounting system in a decentralized environment in which each individual agency is responsible for the proper recording of all financial transactions. However, NCAS does provide control and uniformity of data through central management of other key statewide data fields, a uniform chart of accounts, a central vendor file, system policies, a library of standard control, financial, and budgetary reports; and a set of defined system parameters that assure sufficient levels of timely, accurate information at the agency and statewide levels.

NCAS provides timely, consistent and accurate information access and reporting capabilities to all agency management through online real-time inquiries, fourth generation language mainframe report creation, mainframe online report viewing, and client/server based Decision Support System (DSS) tools and information views.

Capabilities:

• NCAS provides access for inquiry and batch updates
• The system supports approximately 5,600 users
• NCAS provides a report generator and a decision support reporting system
• NCAS supports Cash Basis Fund Accounting (Budgetary Basis) and Accrual Basis Fund Accounting (GAAP Basis)
• It provides complete online transaction audit trail and trace-back capabilities as well as validation of the Uniform Chart of Accounts from all primary and interface users
• NCAS provides security from the application layer through the account code level
• The system provides summary and detailed Information for budgetary and GAAP reporting, multiple period posting cycles and online analysis for accounts and ranges of accounts

Technical Platform:

NCAS was developed using the Geac E Series Governmental Sector application suite. In addition to the base Geac software package, NCAS reporting capabilities are enhanced by a Decision Support System (DSS). NCAS is a mainframe-based system that uses the OS/390 operating system. It is a CICS/VSAM system written in COBOL. The DSS component of NCAS resides on a Sybase RDBMS and uses Cognos and Informatica extraction, query, and reporting tools.