Financial Management Standards

The Bureau of Fiscal Service is responsible for maintaining and maturing financial management standards. To do this, we work closely with other lines of business and standard setting agencies, federal agencies, the vendor community, and other stakeholders.

Standards are important because they establish consistent protocols that can be universally understood and adopted. Standards improve systems and processes, reduce waste, cut costs, and ensure consistency. Application of standards into financial systems and processes helps to ensure interoperability between financial and other supporting systems, supports accurate reporting and leads to automation and cost savings for federal agencies. The federal financial management standards are part of the Financial Management Capability Framework (FMCF), which is used as a basis for evaluating and ensuring that Financial Management (FM) Marketplace solutions and services meet baseline needs for agencies.

Currently, we have seven resources for our standards, all of which are aligned to the Federal Integrated Business Framework.

Common financial management functions, and activities serve as the basis for understanding what services agencies need and solutions that should be offered. This list of 11 functions and 54 activities defines the financial management functions performed by a federal agency.

FFM Business Capabilities reflect the federal financial management system requirements (FFMSRs) that agency financial management systems must substantially comply with. These outcome-based business needs are mapped to Federal government authoritative references, forms, and data standards.

These agency “stories” document the key activities, inputs, outputs and other intersections to describe how the Federal government operates. They are organized into 11 end-to-end business processes that have a federal financial management impact.

This minimum set of business data elements reflects what is required to support the inputs and outputs identified in the business use cases, capabilities, business information exchanges and business reports.

Core FS providers are expected to have these reports pre-built and in their Core FS solution offering. These reports support FFM Functions and Activities and FFM Business Use Cases.

Core FS solutions need to exchange data with other systems. Business rules provide the common exchanges of business information between two functional areas or between a functional area and a centralized service/solution.

Define how the government measures successful delivery of outcomes based on timelines, efficiency, and accuracy targets for FFM outcomes and successful delivery of Cybersecurity, Electronic Records Management and Information Technology Services activities that support FFM activities.

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