The Financial Management Environment (FaME): A prototype interactive hypertext-based financial planning and reporting system

It is critical in every government, research, and industrial organization that accurate and timely financial information be made available at all levels so that, project and business decisions can be made within funding constraints. The FaME prototype implemented at Oak Ridge National Laboratory extracts financial data from a legacy system, builds easy-to-understand reports and graphs, and presents them on-line so that people at all levels in an organization can assess the financial status of individual projects or entire organizations. Reports are presented in hypertext and graphical formats that can be read with popular World Wide Web browsers such as NCSA Mosaic or Netscape. All reports are hyper-linked in a natural way to simplify navigation and information retrieval. To protect potentially sensitive information, FAME provides access control so that individuals can retrieve only the information that is required for them to carry out their financial duties. In addition to the reports and graphs, FAME includes budget building tools to provide for financial planning. Another primary feature is that the prototype 1 utilizes equipment that already exists on the user`s desktop. The overall goal of the FAME system is to provide users with precise and meaningful information on the financial status of an organization or project at a glance.