that has been eighteen months in the making and will set the tone for their information processing for the foreseeable future.

The new financial reporting information management system moves to its implementation stage on April 1, which Accountant General Mrs. Heather Jacobs-Matthews, says will mean an integrated system for Government workers.

"More financial information will be available to more people,'' she said.

"The system will be integrated. We've been working with patchwork systems at the moment. But the brand new system will mean automatic updating of the ledger.

"A key feature is that individual departments will be responsible for keying in their purchase orders and payments. We (in the Accountant General's office) will still have to push the button to issue the cheques, but the departments will have more responsibility to key in the documents that will mean we won't have to deal with a lot of the paper we see now.'' The plan is to start initially with six of the 57 Government departments and then bring the rest on line over the next year.

The new systems were purchased for more than a million dollars from Denver-based J.D. Edwards, a worldwide company that provides systems for Governments of varying sizes. The bill will be paid in phases over a three year period.

Officials have been busily testing the system and more customising is expected. Last week, a special, day-long training session at the Bermuda College was held for representatives from various Government departments to familiarise them with the new changes.

The most notable change will be the quality of information that users can get and a better ability to trace transactions. It is expected to help departments better track, and better manage their resources.

Government's director of budget, Mr. Geoff Bell, said that previously too many programmes were written for separate departments and separate functions, written in effect individually, almost in isolation.

He said,"As a result, you couldn't easily find the detail behind transactions in our financial report. You had to go out of one module and go into another to follow the trail. There were other problems.

"We looked at the possibility of refining, improving and re-programming our existing system with our computer department resources. The cost would have been ridiculous and it would have taken too long to re-write it.

"We put the contract out to tender and after short listing bids, we settled on a company called J.D. Edwards which is a major manufacturer of financial software in the US with a client-base of about 3,000. It is a worldwide organisation with offices in many countries, with clients as large as Coca Cola, the Olympic Games and lots of Japanese corporations.

"But the things we were looking for included the fact that they operated in foreign currencies, because we account in three other currencies other than Bermuda dollars. Sterling, US and Canadian dollars.

"Also 10 percent of their clients were public sector clients.

"Over the past 12 months we have been going through various pilot exercises to ensure that the software package they've provided performs right. We've also been bringing the various modules together into a consolidated pilot.

"Over the last six months we have been fine-tuning it, changing it and adapting it to the way we do business in the Bermuda Government. This is all leading up to the go-live date on April 1.'' Other modules will also be added down the line. A total of 25 modules were purchased.

"We've moved away from the old programme activity to a cost centre type of accounting which allows us to capture costs at a lower and more meaningful level,'' Mr. Bell said.

"We now know what the costs of operating individual units are, probably for the first time. It will be a big plus for managers of departments, allowing them to do their jobs that much better with better information.'' The first big test will be the use of the system to issue payroll cheques next week.