Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB)

The challenge

Our client is a large private university with multiple campuses, faculties, schools and business lines. Every organizational unit managed its own budget lines and required several levels of hierarchical authorization to release a payment. Those processes ran in fragmented fashion on paper forms, email chains and spreadsheets. The result was long approval delays, difficulty tracking payments, and an institution with no real-time view of how much budget was actually available.

The solution

We built SGP, a budget management system delivered as a responsive web platform for desktops, tablets and phones, hosted on the university's own cloud infrastructure. SGP digitizes the entire budget and payment order cycle, from request through final disbursement, providing real-time financial control and removing paper from the process. We designed it to scale to thousands of payment orders per fiscal period and to accommodate dozens of approvers.

What we built

• End-to-end payment order management for suppliers, with a unique sequential fiscal number, native multi-currency handling in bolívares, dollars and euros, and automatic application of the current exchange rate.
• A configurable approval workflow of up to four hierarchical levels plus a final finance sign-off, with bulk approvals, external authorization through secure token links, digital signatures, and mandatory justification for every rejection.
• Real-time budget control that verifies available funds before any payment is approved, reserves the amount when an order is linked, and supports bulk uploads from Excel.
• "My Budget" and "Department Budget" views with automatic currency conversion, so managers and requesters can check availability without going through finance.
• A supplier directory with tax ID (RIF) validation and support for local and international payment methods via SWIFT, IBAN and ABA.
• Alternative authorization paths for sensitive expenses such as payroll and bonuses, routed directly to senior management or HR.
• Debt, in-process debt and special approval reports, exportable to Excel.
• Audit-grade document management, with budgets, contracts and invoices permanently attached to each order, supplier advances, and order PDFs carrying a QR code for verification.
• Automatic email notifications for status changes, pending approvals and reminders.
• Faithful modeling of the university structure, with users able to hold several functional roles at once.
• Fiscal period handling with automatic sequence resets, plus a built-in help center with role-specific instructional videos.

Impact and results

• Forms, signatures and supporting documents fully digitized, with paper removed from the process.
• Sharply reduced approval times thanks to digital work queues.
• Strict real-time budget control that blocks overspending against any line.
• End-to-end traceability of who approved or rejected each payment, when and why.
• Autonomy for every user to manage their own budget transparently, easing the load on IT and finance.
• Consolidated multi-currency reporting for accurate cash flow planning.

Technologies and integrations

• Institutional authentication with Single Sign-On via OAuth
• Procurement system, with automatic synchronization of suppliers and cost centers
• The client's own mail server for notification delivery
• Hosted on the university's cloud infrastructure