Understanding the GTAS Adjusted Trial Balance System

The Government-wide Treasury Account Symbol Adjusted Trial Balance System (GTAS) is used to report agency trial balance data. A single data collection system improves the quality of financial data by combining budgetary and proprietary trial balance reporting, enforcing the USSGL, and implementing new edits and validations. Additionally, GTAS paves the way for more consistent and complete financial data and allows for better analytical reporting.

GTAS accepts only bulk file transmission for the full budgetary and proprietary trial balance data and:

  • Interfaces daily with GWA Central Accounting System for balance and transaction data.

  • Is available for agency use 24 hours per day, seven days per week.

  • Will produce the USSGL Treasury Financial Manual (TFM) starting in 2014. The 2014 TFM will include more detailed information, including the allowable domain values for each attribute-to-USSGL account relationship, new sections for validations and edits, SMAF, and bulk file format.

  • Only accepts the component TAS, a 6-digit USSGL account, and a 3-digit Agency ID.

This section provides a glossary of common terminology and a process flow of the setup and execution of the PeopleSoft federal government reporting.

Term

Definition

ATB

The Adjusted Trial Balance system reports budgetary and proprietary general ledger account balances.

BETC

Business Event Type Code. An eight-character code used in GWA Systems to indicate the type of activity being reported, such as payments, collections, borrowings, etc. This code must accompany the TAS and the dollar amounts in order to classify the transaction against the Fund Balance With Treasury. The BETC in effect replaces the transaction codes and standard subclasses.

BOC

Budget Object Class represents the classification of funding for budgeting, revenue and spending.

CARS

Treasury’s Central Accounting Reporting System

CGAC

Common Government-wide Accounting Classification structure now known as FADS.

DEFC

Disaster Emergency Fund Code

FR

Financial Report of the U.S. Government

GFRS

Government-wide Financial Report System. An application that captures each agency's closing package information; links the agencies' comparative, audited consolidated, department-level financial statements to the FR; and resolves material deficiencies that are identified by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

GTAS

The Government-wide TAS ATB System is a system used by agencies to report budget execution information and proprietary financial reporting information to the Department of the Treasury.

GWA

Government-wide Accounting

MAF

Master Appropriation File

MAX

MAX is an integrated database for the collection, retrieval, manipulation, presentation, and publication of budget formulation and budget execution data, as well as other related data. GTAS data is to be provided to the Office of Management and Budget for use in MAX at least four times a year.

OMB

Office of Management and Budget

SAM

SAM is the Shared Accounting Module that verifies the TAS/BETC information attached to a Collection, Disbursement or IPAC transaction by the FPA is valid per GWA’s Master Enterprise Reference TAS/BETC data.

SID

United States Standard General Ledger Interactive Database

SMAF

Super Master Account File contains the valid TAS balances and TAS attributes that are used for budgetary and proprietary ATB submissions.

TAS

Treasury Account Symbol

USSGL

The U.S. Standard General Ledger provides a uniform Chart of Accounts and technical guidance that is used in standardizing Federal agency accounting and improves the quality and consistency of data reported by agencies.

USSGL accounts versus (GL) agency accounts

USSGL accounts are the Treasury 6-digit required accounts used for reporting. The agency accounts are those accounts posted in the General Ledger that are translated to the USSGL accounts for Treasury reporting.

PeopleSoft General Ledger provides a configurable solution to accommodate the valid combinations of TAS and BETC. These combinations are downloaded from the Treasury SAM website. PeopleSoft’s solution includes the following high-level steps for GTAS compliance:

  • Configure the GTAS ChartField data: Accounts, Funds, Budget Reference, ChartField Attributes, Trees, GTAS Attribute Assignment table, Attribute Exceptions, ChartField Preferences, and optionally, Validations and Edits.

  • Enter transactions with GTAS attributes.

  • Run GTAS Accumulation program to extract ledger data, associate it with attributes, and load the data to GTAS Workbench.

  • Review data in the GTAS Workbench.

  • (Optional) Run the GTAS Validation program, which runs against the GTAS Workbench table to perform specified Treasury or agency GTAS edits and validations. The Validation program runs a list of user-defined queries. The user-defined queries should include the GTAS Staging tables (although, you are able to include any table for the process).

  • Run the GTAS Bulk File Creation program to create the GTAS bulk file which can then be submitted to Treasury.