Original publication date: February, 2009

EDMIS Evolutions

Looking Ahead: New FEMA/Energy Assistance Tracking Requirements

As highlighted in the December issue of The Outreach, SBA expects you to track counseling and training assistance provided in the areas of disaster relief and energy assistance. To accommodate this, build 424 of WebCATS (which all EDMIS-participating centers received in December) featured a brand new drop-down field titled FEMA/Energy Assistance field in both counseling session records and conference records. In addition, the new WinCATS build that accompanies WebCATS build 425 features the ability to export the data contained by these fields to EDMIS. It’s important that you upgrade to this build before the end of March as SBA is expecting this data to be uploaded as part of your second quarter EDMIS exports!

While OutreachSystems is pleased that we were able to get all the technical specifications into the software in plenty of time for you to track this new data requirement, we have to admit that we’re not entirely sure of the circumstances in which this data is supposed to be tracked. In December, we received the following explanation from SBA regarding this new requirement:

“...[SBA is looking to develop] a way to track special programs (like energy grants, disaster grants, etc.) through EDMIS. The idea is that if a partner gets funds outside of their regular funding agreement, we need to be able to identify the counseling (and probably training) that was provided using those funds...” Unfortunately, we don’t know too much more about it than what’s written above. If you have questions about the intent of this new tracking requirement, we ask that you contact SBA for more details.

Looking Back: Error Code 13 Resolved

During last month’s exports, many of you received the following error from SBA:

Invalid value(s) for element CounselingRecord_ClientIntake_Media_Code Code 13 does not match database values. Valid values are [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 98, 99]

It took a little research, but OutreachSystems was able to track down the cause of the error to the new “SBA Website” referral option that was recently added to the SBA641. Although this new referral option was valid, the EDMIS system hadn’t yet been updated with its corresponding code 13, and that’s what caused the error to be returned. As of mid-January, this error has been resolved and as far as we are aware, the EDMIS system is now capable of processing these referral types.

© 2010 Softshare, Inc. All rights reserved. This article is part of an archive of Softshare newsletter articles dating back several years. Some of the screenshots, procedures, or information contained within this article may no longer be 100% accurate or relevant, as Softshare's software and services are very fluid. Thank you for your understanding.