Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof Isah Ali Ibrahim Pantami has launched the FinTrak Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions for government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) this week in Abuja.
Pantami assured that the Federal Government was working tirelessly towards achieving a paperless government system by 2030 and the FinTrak ERP solution will help support digital services across the public sector.
He expressed confidence in the capacity of the solution to meet the peculiar needs of Nigeria’s public sector even as he commended FinTrak’s efforts at strengthening the case for indigenous entrepreneurship.
Local solutions are needed to best address local challenges, the minister said in his keynote topic on: ‘Sustainable Development through the Adoption of Indigenous ICT Solutions in the Public Service.’ The minister was represented by the Director General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi.
The FinTrak Budget software is designed to address budgetary issues in government MDAs. Developed as an online; real-time fully integrated system with the ability to support multiple users with many budget versions, the FinTrak Budget software offers customisation to suit unique business environment and seamlessly integrates with existing platform.
Group Managing Director, Fintrak Software Limited, Mr. Bimbo Abioye, said at the launch that the solution would address basic budgeting process and expenditure management, which had always been a challenge for many MDAs in Nigeria and rest of Africa.
He said financial data and management are very important to effective governance adding that the use of timely and accurate budgeting and expenditure data are key to public health officials’ capacity to make future investment decisions.
“With tools like FinTrak Budget solution, a lot of these challenges affecting full-budget implementation can be corrected. The improvements in technology would make things more transparent and monitoring easier. Technology can be said to be the solution to budget implementation problem.” Abioye stated.
Fintrak Enterprise Budget Solution is a centralized Budget processing software that automates the present manual processing and approval of budgets for various organisations especially the public sector. The solution has the capacity to automatically generate pre-built reports that can be obtainable across various levels of the organisation.
“The budget solution has many features such as the ability to establish a variety of roles within a workflow process; ability to develop the projections and base budget directly in the system; ability to copy and use prior year’s budget or actual amounts as a starting point; ability to develop the projections and base budget directly in the system; ability to copy and use prior year’s budget or actual amounts as a starting point, among others.”
The event was attended by many senior government functionaries including the National Commissioner, the National Commissioner/CEO Nigeria Data Protection Bureau (NDPB), Dr. Vincent Olatunji who urged on the need to build in data privacy requirements into such solutions to ensure they comply with existing regulations on data privacy.