home
home
about beacon

About BEACON: Impacted Systems: Core Budget System (CBS)

Business Purpose:

The Core Budget System consists of three modules: Budget Preparation System (BPS), Budget Revision System (BRS), and Salary Control System (SCS). These systems are used to prepare the Governor's continuation budget for the Legislature, to certify the Legislature's approved budget, to process revisions to the budget, and to monitor annual salary obligations. All state agencies and universities use these online systems on a regular basis.

In 1988 the online BPS was implemented to support the development of the state's biennial budget. Agencies are given budget guidance that describes the overall economic goals of the budget and the budget development calendar. Agencies enter their budget requests into BPS online in accordance with the budget guidance. Actual expenditure-to-date information is loaded into BPS through an interface with the North Carolina Accounting System (NCAS). The Office of State Budget Management (OSBM) makes its adjustments to the agency budget requests and develops the Governor's budget. The Governor's budget is submitted, in hard copy format only, to the Legislature for review and approval. The Legislature has its own budget development process that it uses to develop the final approved state budget.

The BRS was developed in 1985 for agencies to make revisions to the certified budget. Agencies are able to request budget revisions online on a daily basis. If the budget revision is created at the detail level, the system automatically summarizes line items up to the certified fund/object level allowing the revision to be viewed at either level. The budget revision process has specific and stringent rules with regard to budget revision approval. BRS updates BPS, NCAS, PMIS, and CMCS with budget revision, budget position, and budget code transfer information.

OSBM also is responsible for maintaining information about positions and budgeted salaries and ensuring that the budget for salaries is not overspent on an annual basis as well as on an actual cash basis. The Salary Control System (SCS) brings together all budget and personnel transactions that affect salaries and position counts to report the annual obligation and show annual salary reserve generated or consumed by these changes. Essentially SCS performs a type of position control function. As budget revisions are requested, SCS is used to determine the availability of budget funds for the position in question. SCS also determines the salary reserve (difference between budgeted salary and actual salary).

Capabilities:

  • BPS provides on-line access (browser-based or terminal emulation) to approximately 300 agency and OSBM personnel. It also provides public access via the Internet.
  • BPS updates NCAS with the certified budget and provides prior period actual expenditure data for use in budget preparation.
  • BRS provides on-line access to agency and OSBM users via the internet and terminal emulation
  • BRS processes approximately 8,000 budget revisions each year and interfaces with NCAS and SCS to provide budget revision data.
  • SCS provides budget revision data to PMIS

Technical Platform:

The Core Budget Systems reside on the mainframe in the OS/390 operating system with an IMS DL1 database. The systems are written in COBOL. BPS also provides Internet access for both system users and the public at large. The browser-based component of BPS was built using HTML and the Shadow Web Server (by Neon Systems) as the Web server from the mainframe. It interfaces with IMS as an Advanced Program-to-Program Communication (APPC). The Oracle RDBMS is also used for data on the Solaris operating system (Sun UNIX). The Core Budget System has been in use for over 15 years.