Original publication date: September, 2006
SBA has announced several major reporting changes for fiscal year 2007.
Beginning October 1, resource partners will no longer need to track or submit information transfer data to the EDMIS system. Softshare will leave the inquiry and information transfer records in the 'CATS database indefinitely for you to use at your discretion, but the WinCATS EDMIS export feature will no longer support information transfer functionality.
The next version of Softshare 'CATS, due out in October, will support the concept of "pre-clients" and you will be able to assign non-reportable counseling sessions to these pre-clients. Depending on your center's operations, this may be a desirable alternative to using inquiry records.
Data will only be certified at the end of the fiscal year, not quarterly. So instead of being permanently "locked" every three months, your data will only be locked once every 12 months, giving you quite a bit more leeway if you should need to make edits or corrections to data that has already been uploaded to EDMIS.
SBA intends to capture economic impact data (SBA loan, non-SBA loan, and equity capital data) in the EDMIS system by the end of fiscal year 2007. While SBA and the SBA EDMIS Task Force (of which Softshare is a member) work out the technical specifications for this new reporting requirement, you should continue to track investment data as usual, using investment records in 'CATS.
The new SBDC Program Announcement says that SBA will be manipulating your uploaded EDMIS data to determine the number of long-term counseling clients, which are clients that have received five or more hours of counseling. However, there is a twist on the date range SBA will be using to determine qualified clients. SBA will use October 1, 2005 (the advent of EDMIS) as the beginning of the date range, which it considers to be the start of all client history. But most SBDCs consider client history to have begun when the client first approached the center.
So even though EDMIS will be calculating long-term counseling clients based upon the October 1, 2005 date, you may choose to calculate your goals based on the start of your Softshare 'CATS database. Either way, you can query WebCATS for long-term client numbers using this set of steps.