Employees from ifmis during training[Photo/ifmis.go.ke]
Gone are the days when officials from every ministry, government department and agency used to troop to the National Treasury with heaps of files in the months leading to the end of each financial year to present the financial needs of their institutions.Technology is here with us and the analog system has been replaced with Integrated Financial Management Information Systems (IFMIS) Planning to Budget (P2B) system.All finance officers are required to do is draw up procurement plans within this system and based on the plan, they then come up with a programme-based budget for the following financial year.The different budgetary needs for all government institutions are then collated into one Budget that constitutes the proposed revenues and spending for the National government for a financial year.All this is also done within the system. And besides reducing the stacks of paper and human traffic at the Treasury, the automation of the budgeting system is saving taxpayers billions of shillings money that has in the past been lost due to a chaotic financial management system that made it difficult to enforce accountability.In the past, devious officials have budgeted for non-existent projects or inflated the budgets for others with a view of lining their pockets. But the vice will soon be a thing of the past because IFMIS Planning to Budget (P2B) system is mainstreaming the budgeting process as well as tracking the spending by all State institutions.Most importantly, the IFMIS system has inbuilt mechanisms to prevent the transfer of funds to projects they were not initially meant for. And through a tool called the IFMIS Dashboard, the system gives the CSs and their Principal Secretaries a graphical representation of allocated budgets and expenditure levels at a single login.