New software is currently being developed by Village Software to manage the Student Activities Fee funding and greatly improve club transactions by eliminating the need for much manual data entry and re-entry, immediate past Student Union Treasurer Choon Woo Ha '08 said. Ha explained how club funding currently requires the use of many different online and manual processes, as clubs are able to request money through my.brandeis.edu and by coming before the Finance Board. Once clubs have been allocated money, he continued, club officers need to fill out appropriate paperwork for the Office of the Union Treasury, which uses a software called Quickbooks to process allocations. The budget office in the Office of Students and Enrollment, the Accounts Payable Office and the Payroll Office use different software systems, such as Peoplesoft, to account for transactions transmitted from the Treasury Office, he continued.

Village Software will create a single Web interface for all of those functions, Ha said, establishing a quicker and more accurate system.

Ha stressed that accuracy will improve. "There is a chance if you're using five different systems, we're going to have five different results for data," Ha said. "Now we'll have only one data that's going to be used by everybody."

Ha emphasized that the system would greatly speed up financial transactions. "The time that [club leaders] take to fill out the forms and drop it off and then we do the double-checking, [this] is going to expedite it so much more," Ha said.

While students will still have to print and submit hard copies of some forms, such as Proof of Payment, to the Office of the Treasurer, filling them out online will be easier, Ha said.

The system will also provide more information to students, Ha said. "Each club will be able to know 24/7 how much money they spent," he said.

Frank Urso, assistant vice president for students and enrollment and budget director recommended the program, Ha said. In an e-mail to the Justice, Urso wrote he worked with Village Software on the creation of a similar system in his previous position at the Harvard Business School.

"[The program] will provide a better interface for club leaders and it will consolidate the functionality of two entire systems, and elements of two others into one system," Urso wrote.

"One of the biggest benefits will be bringing SAF budget and expenditure data from two systems together to eliminate the need for a difficult periodic reconciliation process," he wrote.

The Student Union government signed one contract with the company to begin a "requirement gathering project" from February through April, for which the Village Software gathered all the necessary information needed for software development, Ha said.

The Union and Village Software signed a second contract for the development of the software in April, Ha said.

The exact design of the system won't be known until the completion of the software over the summer, he explained. He added that adjustments to the software would be possible after the initial launch of the program.

The cost of the new software is $70,000, to be paid out of the Student Union's Reserve Fund, formerly known as the Capital Expenditure Fund, he explained.

In an e-mail to club leaders sent at the end of April, Ha noted some of the features of the new system such as the ability to view information for all club accounts and request and unrequest funds from those accounts, allowing the Student Union to allocate or unallocate funds.

The system will also automatically reconcile data with Peoplesoft, the University's accounting system, and allow the public reporting of club financing to the entire University community, he added.

Ha said that the system would hopefully be in place by the fall. He said he expected new Union Treasurer Max Wallach '09 to communicate the changes to students by e-mail toward the end of the summer and in the mandatory information sessions for club leaders at the beginning of the year. "I don't think people will realize how big of a project it is, until it's actually there and people actually see it with their own eyes," Ha said.