JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, Texas – The Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center has developed a new tool to provide installations real-time budget visibility and significantly reduce manual data processing.
Developed by the AFIMSC Financial Management Directorate, the Budget Analysis Tool, or BAT, consolidates 40 million rows of data from the Commander’s Resource Integration System and the Air Force's Automated Funds Management System into a single, authoritative source for financial management.
"The BAT is our one-stop shop for funds execution," said Capt. William Mitchell, an AFIMSC budget analyst. "It brings together spending tracking, open documents, reimbursements and overall budget execution into one easily accessible location.”
The BAT's automated data integration and visualization tool will replace manually pulling information from multiple systems and working in spreadsheets, saving significant time and effort Mitchell said. AFIMSC offers training to help teams quickly become proficient with the tool.
"It’s easy and repeatable," he said. "Information is readily available without manual extraction."
With already over 300 daily users across AFIMSC detachments and primary subordinate units, the Pentagon and major commands, the tool is making an impact at all levels, Mitchell said.
The BAT offers a range of capabilities to streamline financial management, including:
- Status of Funds: Gives installations a real-time overview of budget execution across various appropriations, enabling quicker responses to changing needs and improved financial planning.
- Daily Audit/Change: Offers transactional-level detail, allowing users to see daily postings, track obligations and monitor progress toward spending targets. "The daily change feature gives users up-to-the-minute insight into spending," Mitchell said. "'Are we on target? Are we burning enough per day?' It helps us answer these critical questions, not only for mid-year and end-of-year tracking, but for ongoing management."
- Open Document Listing and Selective Transaction History: Provides a detailed view of open travel orders, contracts and other financial documents, including their age and status. This allows users to quickly identify bottlenecks and resolve issues. "Users can drill down to the transactional data and see every transaction for a given day across the Air Force," Mitchell said.
Beyond these core features, the BAT also integrates seamlessly with PowerPoint and offers AI-powered insights, automatically identifying trends and anomalies for the user.
“It can connect live to PowerPoint,” he said. "Anytime a user presents information, it will be the most current."
AFIMSC is working to further develop and expand the BAT. Future enhancements will include incorporating installation-specific coding structures, developing dashboards for tracking fall-in and fallout funds, creating customized dashboards, and updates requested from the field, Mitchell said.
"We're always open to feedback,” he said.
Installations looking to enhance their budget management processes can explore the BAT, accessible via the CAC-enabled AFIMSC FM SharePoint site at https://usaf.dps.mil/teams/RMSO/RMA/SitePages/BAT.aspx.
For questions or feedback, users can contact Capt. Mitchell or the AFIMSC FM team through the BAT Change Matrix within the tool.