Original publication date: November, 2006

EDMIS: 2006 Year in Review and Lessons Learned Along the Way

*Whew*! One whole year of EDMIS under our belts and we all made it through with flying colors. A big congratulations to everyone for so diligently working to understand the EDMIS process. Unfortunately, we can't bask in contentment for too long. Many changes are afoot and many lessons have been learned—and they should all be forefront in our minds as we tackle fiscal year 2007.

Lessons Learned

By far, the trickiest part of the EDMIS upload process has proved to be remembering to manually set the status of the records in you your very final, successful uploads to "Accepted" in WinCATS. Most of you have no trouble importing the EDMIS Error Report into WinCATS and using WinCATS' features to fix and resend those records with noted errors. However, once EDMIS gives your export its stamp of approval (i.e. all records were successfully submitted and no EDMIS Error Report is provided), a large number of you forget that WinCATS still needs to be "told" of this success.

We'll skip the boring details of why it's so important for WinCATS to know when a record has been accepted (although you can read all about it on page 99 of the Softshare 'CATS EDMIS Guide) and instead go straight to the steps you MUST take after successfully submitting an export file:

1. Open the successful EDMIS export record in WinCATS.
2. Open the appropriate page of the EDMIS export record (e.g. if the export file contains 888 data, open the 888s page).
3. Click the Details button.
4. Click the Accept All button.

That's it! Four easy steps that will save you a lot of headache down the road.

And then, just as crucial to the EDMIS process, is the need to lock records after they've been certified by EDMIS. This step is also often overlooked which, unfortunately, will eventually cause problems because EDMIS gets very annoyed when edits are made to previously-certified records. Therefore, you need to prevent edits from being made.

Originally, EDMIS certified your data quarterly, but they recently changed to annual certification. Even so, Softshare still recommends that you lock down all data submitted to EDMIS quarterly—immediately after submitting your export files. If you find errors after the fact, an administrator can still go in and make changes and, assuming it's the same fiscal year, those changes will be accepted by EDMIS, but by locking down the data, you have the peace of mind of knowing that edits can't be made lightly.

To lock exported data, open the General page of WinCATS' global configuration settings and configure the Prevent edit/add/deletion of old records? setting.

Unavoidable Discrepancies

EDMIS and Softshare 'CATS have come a long way toward understanding each other, but there are still some unavoidable discrepancies between how EDMIS and Softshare 'CATS interpret the exact same data. We know of at least four areas in which EDMIS and 'CATS may not be in synch.

An SBA district office can pull reports from EDMIS by their respective district. However, each of you reports to EDMIS based on your program's nationwide activity. For example, if a center in Montana counsels a client in New York because that client is looking at moving to Montana, the counseling sessions for that client will be reported in the SBA New York district manager's report, not in the Montana district manager's report. During audit, it will be impossible to tell where the numbers came from because EDMIS is district-centric and 'CATS tracks actual performance of your centers regardless of the district the client is located in.
EDMIS has no means of tracking a client's movement from one center to another. A client that starts off at Center A but then moves to Center B will forever more be tracked under Center A in the EDMIS system, regardless of the center ownership indicated in 'CATS.
SBA has a special calculation that they perform to determine the number of clients that started a business during the fiscal year. They compare the client's initial status (pre-venture, start-up, in-business) with the client's current status. If the client went from pre-venture to in-business, it's considered a start-up. This is logical, but what if the initial information was in error, as is often the case. If the client didn't properly disclose the fact that they were already in business, there is no way to correct the intial status in the EDMIS system and this client will be considered a start-up by EDMIS.
For the 2007 fiscal year, SBA intends to track "long-term clients" which they identify as clients that have had 5+ hours of counseling over their lifetime. Unfortunately, that lifetime for SBA begins on October 1, 2005, the date EDMIS came into existence. But most SBDCs consider client history to have begun when the client first approached the center.

These are just some of the discrepancies that Softshare is aware of. There may be others out there waiting to be discovered.

What Next?

Softshare is already aware of several reporting requirement changes for fiscal year 2007 and we expect more as the year progresses. But even though there's lots of change on the horizon, we're confident that the EDMIS upload process will continue to improve and get easier—for all of us.