The proposal was reviewed and approved in concept. People and resources were committed to the project in 1997 and work was begun on the first set of reports, the basic ledger set. The QDB is fed from the production Financial System and is reconciled against the General Ledger during the nightly update. Using this method allows more interactive queries, allows history data to be provided, and does not interfere with real-time data update. The OFSR reports required modification of some QDB tables, including the creation of new views to improve performance.
Users can now view the data daily.
Monthly reports may be viewed on the sixth or seventh workday of the month. This provides a 5-10 improvement in data currency. OFSR will also allow Accounting to phase out certain printed reports. School of Medicine had an Excel based reporting system, but there were compatibility issues. In addition, Excel could not provide all the requirements and its presentation of the data was poor.