2.05: Show Me the Money
As a battalion XO, I was responsible for the budget. For its own reasons, the US government’s fiscal year starts in October and ends in September. This means that new XOs, who typically take on the job in June or July, get punched right in the face by end of year budget woes. These are quickly followed up by a jab to the gut with the need to submit next year’s budget immediately after. I had a great mentor working in the group’s comptroller’s office and she’d patiently coached me enough to work out most of the plan for the next year. All I had to figure out was how much we needed to set aside for schools.1
Unfortunately, there was no data for me to build a budget from. We struggled to even get a list of all the schools we had sent everyone to in the year previous, never mind calculate their individual and combined costs. I worked with the schools’ NCO and the best we had were the quads soldier’s submitted to get signatures before their travel would be approved. The problem was the quads were made on PowerPoint, hand carried to the headquarters where they were hand signed before being returned to the soldier to upload, whereupon they were almost all shredded. There was no way for me to recreate a year’s worth of the quads. So based off some hasty math the schools NCO and I came up with, I guessed.
I started by copying the quad into InfoPath. This was partly so I could capture the schools’ costs over the next year, and make sure my replacement would be better informed than I was. But mostly, I did it because I’m lazy. I hated having to walk the quarter mile over the the headquarters to get the group XO to sign them, usually three to four times a week (I also noticed he wasn’t particularly enjoying the random interruptions). So I asked him if he’d be willing to let me make a digital system instead, which somewhat surprisingly he agreed to without any push back. Those interruptions must’ve been taking a toll.
The quads were just a rollup of who was going on the trip with a total of how much money it was going to cost. They had a few details like airfare, rental car, and per diem costs broken out, and a spot for signatures. Switching to an online portal with digital signatures was easy, and adjusting the new form to do the math for the user was smart, since both got me more accurate data. No more stubby pencil math for a PowerPoint slide. It also made the soldiers in the battalion’s lives easier, since they only had to punch in a couple values and let the calculator do the math. I’m not certain why I tied the form to the PERSTAT we’d built, but it ended up being the first in a series of data tendrils that fed in and out of the database.
Soldiers could quickly add every member of the trip with just a couple keystrokes and clicks, and the math side of the formula automatically adjusted based on the headcount. As each form was submitted by a soldier, I got an email notification. Depending on how busy I was, I could sign it immediately or get to it when I had time. When I signed it, it instantly shot the group XO an alert without any extra effort on my part. The group XO and I found that if I signed them by 1600 each day, he’d clear out the log on his way out of work, and I could ensure the soldiers had their approval waiting for them in the morning. And as each one came in, my database of information started to grow.
What I didn’t appreciate at the time was how useful all the information which had nothing to do with schools’ costs would be. The InfoPath quads were giving me a real-time track for where we were spending our money. What follows is going to be a bit nerdy, so feel free to skip ahead three paragraphs. Unless you think you might be an XO someday. If that’s the case, READ!
Briefly, there are lots of types of money in the Department of Defense, often called ‘colors’ despite none of them actually being described with a color. Each pot has rules on what you can and cannot spend that money on, but there are also ways to move money between pots. Most of the money I dealt with was O&M.2 As a result of the versatility of O&M it can often be the first pot an expense starts out at.
Take JCETs, the foreign training I’ve referenced once or twice. Those can be very expensive trips, with some bills that top out around $400,000. Flying all the way to Asia costs money. All the costs of the JCET are paid for with a separate JCET fund, but that’s not a checking account you get to draw from. Instead, all the costs start off being tracked in O&M, but only when the trip is over, and the final budget submitted does the money cost transfer out of O&M and into the JCET fund.
Another example is FORCEMOD.3 The challenge is you typically only get about four days to put together a fairly detailed packet to approve the purchase, which means if you don’t have it in your back pocket, you probably won’t get it complete in time. That is unless you’ve already spent the money and bought the equipment with O&M. Then they can just move eligible purchases to the FORCEMOD line, and effectively you get a refund. Being on top of things like this requires good data, which the InfoPath quads were silently amassing for me in the background.
All this moving around of funds makes keeping track of how much money you actually have particularly tricky, which is why we have a whole comptroller’s office to help. It also means they spend most of the year without a clear idea of how much money is coming off our O&M account. Every unit in the Army does this same dance: in June everyone panics that they’re overspent, so they freeze all spending in July. The comptrollers do the long math in August, and suddenly panic when there’s too much unspent money that must be burned through in September. The whole army does this. Every year.
Except my battalion back in 2016. In November, I had the comptroller send me their data on how much our battalion had spent thus far in the fiscal year. Equipped with the quads that had been submitted, I had asked them to cost transfer over half of the charges they were tracking as spent O&M and reimburse our battalion. I had to show my math, but when it checked out, they adjusted their data, and our spent funds dropped dramatically. Normally this would upset commanders, because they don’t want to look underspent. But the key was we weren’t underspent. Instead, we were the only battalion that actually knew how much they had actually used.
It was sort of like playing the ‘The Price is Right’, except I was the only person who knew the exact price of the sofa set. Everyone else is worried about going over, so they bid under to be safe. But I could run it up to the absolute last penny. One unique thing about the Army is, if you really know how to track your funding, you can spend the other units’ money too. Which I proceeded to do, funding a lot of training we wouldn’t have normally been able to because I could confidently tell the commander the money was there. The comptroller loved me, because he just wanted to stick the landing: getting to exactly $0.00 by the end of September. I was making his life easier, all while using money from other underspent battalions on our own battalion’s training.
It’s important to highlight, beyond the InfoPath quads getting me access to data, the important trick was being able to swim in two datasets and being confident in my ability to compare the two in data form. Every unit I’ve been in thus far in the Army tracks budgets as bar charts on PowerPoint slides. You can’t do data analysis with pictures on slides, and the best you can hope for predictive-wise is a rough burn rate. But your unit doesn’t spend funding evenly throughout the year, so you’re back to underbidding, because you lack the precision to know when you’ll be spending on what. To keep that clarity, you’ve got to keep, read, and understand the dollars as data.
The PERSTAT was the backbone of a dozen systems we built in the battalion. It helped populate and track the quads. It also had a tool to track ALL THE THINGS: awards, evaluations, credit card debt, mandatory training, etc. There was a unified report generator for the whole battalion, set to print every report onto 8.5” by 11” pages of paper. I included a drop-down filter as well, which enabled the companies to print a report of just their issues, so they wouldn’t have to hunt among all the other companies’ data. Everything tracked by the system was never again lost. The time savings of not having to redo lost awards alone made the evenings we spent building the network worth it.
It was the first time in my career I was able to see the power of interlacing systems to build a sum greater than its parts. That trick, linking data sets together, was a bonus for the battalion, and it allowed us to move faster. What I hadn’t anticipated was, in my next job, moving faster stopped being a perk, and started being essential.
The army has a lot of schools that provide additional skills, and SF has even more, such as military freefall, dive school, advanced sniper, and even regular professional development. Units have to pay the per-diem and travel costs when they send a student to these courses.
Operations and Maintenance. One of the lines of funding units in the military have, often the most flexible.
Force Modernization dollars, which are used to purchase things like new IT equipment.
This is a highly underrated skill in the Army. So much doesn’t get done bc of not understanding how much you can do.