isabella232 / federal-grant-reporting

Improving the experience of federal grant reporting.

The 10x Federal Grant Reporting project

Project description

The 10x Federal Grant Reporting project is enabling simpler, faster, easier, better resolution of single audit findings by agencies and grantees alike.

To that end, we're building prospective shared solutions for the single audit finding resolution process.

Distiller

Distiller, provides easier access to audit data. What is a multi-day process for some agencies has been reduced to a few minutes by helping grant managers sorting through the Federal Audit Clearinghouse to identify the specific audits that they need to know have been completed and confirm if action needs to be taken by themselves or others. This tool is also helpful auditors, agency CFOs as well as grantees to be aware of audit activity happening by federal agency/sub agency.

Try out the Distiller for yourself or view its separate github repo.

Audit Data Extractor

Download any audit pdf from the distiller and run it though this module that reads Single Audit PDFs page by page and extracts findings text and corrective action plans which can be viewed as a csv. This proof-of-concept module that is a companion to the Distiller. This lays the groundwork for improved data entry into the Federal Audit Clearinghouse. When uploading a single audit pdf, the Audit Data Extractor will extract and pre-populate finding information into the data collection form so that auditors or grantees can review and confirm the data rather than requiring them to copy and paste or retype critical data. When you consider that for each finding, multiple fields are required to be filled out, and the number of audit findings each year, the time savings is considerable. One outside auditor for a state audit said he typically sees 100 findings in each years audit and that this could save 1.5 hours to his work and another 1.5 hours to the grantees staff time considering the additional fields added to the data collection form.

View the code on the Distiller repo.

Earlier prototypes explored

SAFR or Single Audit Finding Resolution tool focuses on the high-priority post-award financial grant reporting. By facilitating direct communication and increasing visibility into the state of work, the prototype dramatically 1) streamlines the finding resolution process and 2) gives agencies unprecedented visibility into single audit findings relevant to their shared grantees, thereby reducing costly duplication of effort for agencies and grantees alike.

View the code and Design files for the UI.

Auto-populating the FFR This tool fills out more than a quarter of the FFR's fields using data from SAM.gov, where all grant applicants must register before applying for grants, The FFR, or SF-425, is a form grantees have to fill out and submit at least four times per year. Using this tool would reduce error prone and duplicative data entry.

View the codebase.

How can you help?

Federal granting agency

If you're someone who works with single audits at a federal agency, we're interested in speaking with you.

Email the team at [email protected] or File an issue.

Independent auditors

If you're someone who's created single audits, we're interested in talking with you and better understanding your current process and any pain points around creating audits and adding them to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse.

Email the team at [email protected] or File an issue.

Grantees

If you've developed corrective action plans or been involved in single audit finding resolution, we'd love to talk.

Email the team at [email protected] or File an issue.

What we've done so far

For background and context, see this project's history.

Local development

1. Install Docker. If you're on OS X, install Docker for Mac. If you're on Windows, install Docker for Windows.

2. Open terminal (Mac) or command line (PC) and “enter” to move into the single-audit directory at the repository root:

cd single-audit

3. Run the three following commands:

docker-compose build 
docker-compose run app python manage.py migrate
docker-compose run app python manage.py createsuperuser

docker-compose build builds the containers by pulling down a number of libraries which take a few minutes to download and install but you only do this once.

docker-compose run app python manage.py migrate runs a Django command to create the database and the tables and columns.

docker-compose run app python manage.py createsuperuser creates an account to access admin panel.

4. Once the above commands are successful, run:

docker-compose up

This will start up all required servers in containers and output their log information to stdout.

5. Visit http://localhost:8000/ directly to access the site.

You can access the admin panel at /admin by logging in with the super user credentials you created in the step above.

Create sample finding data

Once you can access the admin interface for the project (at /admin), you'll be able to create sample finding data locally.

Start by adding and saving a new finding: http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/resolve_findings/finding/add/.

See the project locally

Once your new finding record is saved, visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/findings/1/ to see the Finding Resolution Page.

Here is what that page looks like as of June 2019:

... and here is what the comments section looks like as of June 2019:

Project structure

federal-grant-reporting/
├── sam-to-ffr/
├── single-audit/
│   ├── distiller/
│   ├── fac/
│   ├── resolve_findings/
│   └── single_audit/
└── tools/

• tools: A home for one-off scripts written in service of the project.
• sam-to-ffr: Flask prototype application from Phase II; a proof-of-concept app which fills out fields of the Federal Financial Report form based on data from SAM.gov.
• single-audit: Main application being developed during Phase III; a Django project with several sub-apps.
  • single-audit/single_audit: Home for project-wide resources and settings, such as shared CSS, URL structure, and shared settings for development/production.
  • single-audit/distiller: Prototype app — exploring the idea of parsing data from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse and distilling it down into the most relevant information.
  • single-audit/fac: Prototype app — exploring the idea of a front-end interface for the Federal Audit Clearinghouse which could let findings be entered in a templatized way. This is currently a stub (i.e., very much an early work in progress).
  • single-audit/resolve_findings: Prototype app for Single Audit Finding Resolution. Actively under development.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING for additional information.

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.