The Ministry of Finance launches the Central Economic System

Last update: 07.12.2022 13:00

Starting from 1 January 2023, 157 state-funded and state-subsidised public administration organisations will be using the Central Economic System (hereinafter also referred to as “CES”) to keep and process their economic and personnel administration records. This new economic information system, co-financed from the EU funds, will allow its users to ensure a better performance and higher quality of their internal organisational processes. Thanks to CES, a number of processes will be digitised and unified across all involved organisations.

“This digitisation and unification will eliminate several barriers and enable the comprehensive implementation of methodological guidelines and support, and it will also provide more uniform, accessible and comparable data for better state governance,” said the General Secretary of the Service Office, Veronika Gmiterko.

In addition to the government sector organisations which were previously using the predecessor of CES, a cross-ministerial economic system, the entities involved in the pilot will also include selected organisations outside this system, such as organisations from the portfolio of the Ministry of Culture. The reason is that they also use different information systems and, therefore, the harmonisation and migration of data is more complex. However, the cooperation and personal involvement of all employees of the participating organisations is exemplary and is one of the enabling factors thanks to which the system can be put into full operation in less than a month.

The content of the modules and functionalities in CES covers areas such as HR, time management, wages and salaries, budget, financial accounting, material management, keeping asset registers and other key areas of the individual organisations’ internal management. Examples of the improvements to be brought by the individual modules include innovative tools for the budgeting process, modern record-keeping of an employee’s life cycle, or transparency and a greater detail of the records of the state’s assets. Further optimisation of processes will result from the integration with other internal and external information systems managed by the public administration entities, which will support the state's “once-and-no-more” target.

The expected benefit of the implementation of CES is clear and comparable data centralised in a common place, which will be reflected both in an improved management of public finances and in a better internal governance of organisations. The benefits of CES for organisations will include reduced costs of the operation of separate information systems and relief from operating expenses. The selected organisations will thus launch in January a proCESs towards a better governed state.

“It is a revolutionary change like this that may help the government sector to better manage crisis situations, from a pandemic to an energy crisis. Economic data that are available in one place and uniform, of a high quality, consistent and comparable provide the necessary inputs for the decision-making and effective management of organisations as well as the public finances as a whole. And they also provide inputs for subsequent efficiency and transparency controls,” concluded Veronika Gmiterko.

Press Department
Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic