Treasury information management (TRIM) is a web-enabled application supporting e-financial management of treasuries in Kerala. It is designed and developed as a centralised repository of treasury transactions and related data to provide government-to-government (G2G) and government-to-citizen (G2C) services. A workflow-based treasury payment/receipt transaction processing system has been established to cater to all the requirements of individual treasuries, from the counter to the accounting stage.
The treasury information system (TIS), a clientserver architecture that forms the foundation of TRIM, has been implemented in all the 197 treasuries in Kerala. Under the system, payment and receipt transactions in all the treasuries are transmitted to the data centre on a daily basis at the Directorate of Treasuries using the TIS application through a dial-up network. This is to combine various data to generate useful information required for effective financial management of the state. Apart from tracking individual transactions, the TRIM system maintains treasury-wise, date-wise, and head-of-account-wise summary details for effective and fast information delivery.
The Kerala government has been implementing several IT initiatives for effective functioning of different government departments as part of its e-governance programme. The finance department expressed the need to have a centralised and integrated mechanism for monitoring the financial position of the state. The state government entrusted the responsibility to design, develop and implement treasury computerisation, to the National Informatics Centre (NIC). The treasury computerisation project is one of the major e-governance projects of the state government to be developed by the NIC.
TRIM is a collaborative portal for departments, planners, policy makers and citizens, providing centralised data of all receipts and payments for evaluation, monitoring and policy planning.
The average number of transactions received per day is around 60,000. TRIM offers solutions
to queries related to expenditure and receipts of any department for any given period. It also helps to calculate progressive expenditure against the budgeted estimate and the permissible amount set by the finance department.
Key benefits
G2C services
- Citizens benefit by receiving passbook details of bank savings, fixed deposits, pensioners’ accounts, etc. through the treasury data centre of TRIM.
G2G services
- The TRIM system provides current cash flow details of the treasuries to the finance department on a day-to-day basis to help the government take informed and quick decisions.
All the treasury departments in the state are computerised, and any new treasury that is set up is connected to the network. In a treasury, all transactions are processed and monitored through TIS. Manual ledgers and registers are no longer maintained in any treasury. Over 2,500 employees of all the 197 treasuries of the state have been trained to use the TIS and TRIM software. In addition, two TIS administrators have been designated in each of the treasuries for maintaining records of the day-to-day activities of the treasury through the system. Also, district coordinators have been designated at every district treasury for coordinating the activities of TIS through the administrators.
Conclusion
The TRIM solution facilitates the generation of various head-of-account-wise reports, and monthly and daily financial reports. The solution has made a significant difference to the performance of the various departments of the government by improving treasury management practices. At the same time, it has aligned the budgeted requirements of different government departments with the estimates established by the finance department.