A small group of agencies will prepare portions or all of their FY 2001 budgets with the new system. The other agencies will be incorporated into the system by July 2000. The briefings will be held on June 15 and 17 in the Briefing Center at 45 Calvert Street, Annapolis. BPAS is a windows-based PC application that manipulates data stored at the Annapolis Data Center. Integrated modules provide a wide variety of features for agencies to construct, submit, and manage budgets throughout a fiscal year.
Implementation is scheduled to occur in two waves.
Those agencies not using BPAS for FY 2001 will be incorporated as part of the second wave for FY 2002 budget preparation. BPAS is a large and full-featured computer application. More memory, at least 128 MB, will be useful to those agencies that work with program budgets with more than 2500 lines of detail. More memory provides better performance when working with large amounts of data. This optimum machine may only be useful for central office budget analysts working and viewing large sections of an agency budget.