Consultancy to Develop the Expense Claims Module of the OneFirm Integrated System (OFIS)

Organization Background Forcier is a multi-disciplinary research and monitoring & evaluation firm operating across Africa and the Middle East since 2011. Our core services include program evaluations, opinion polling, third party monitoring, and capacity building for UN Agencies, NGOs, governments and private sector clients operating in post-conflict and challenging environments. Forcier currently has offices in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Kenya, Mozambique, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, and Sudan. Project Background OneFirm Integrated System (OFIS) The OneFirm Integrated System (OFIS) is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool that has been developed internally to replace spreadsheet-based trackers which had previously been used across the company in departments such as Human Resources, Business Development, and Contract Management. It addresses the disadvantages of using spreadsheets for long-term storage and processing of company data for scalable applications. OFIS is a modular suite of applications that have been built using G Suite tools (Google App Maker) within the Google Cloud Platform and using Google Cloud SQL for data management and storage. It is modular because the applications that have been developed are separate packages developed in App Maker. The suite shares a single database where multiple tables are stored. Google Cloud Platform is used to publish the applications and to interact with the database. Expense Claims module An expense claim is a request to repay money back to an employee who has used their own money for purchases such as food and travel while they are doing their job; also known as a reimbursement. Forcier currently uses a spreadsheet-based reimbursements and expense claim tracking and approval system that has been enhanced with Google Apps Script. The HR and Finance groups of the company have redesigned the expense claim approval process to address new structures in the company as well as for financial compliance. The spreadsheet system is not easily scaled or dynamic to handle the new procedures; it also has several disadvantages inherent to a spreadsheet-based system: (1) Complex submission process; (2) Difficulty of tracking expenses incurred from projects; (3) Lack of visibility by all parties involved on the status of claims/requests; and, (4) Limited reporting options for fulfilled claims/requests.  Project Objectives Given the project background, therefore, Forcier seeks to hire a consultant Software Developer to produce the Expense Claims module (ECM) of the existing OFIS system. The ECM should be a single application package built in Google App Maker (separate from the existing modules/applications) and it should share the database used by the rest of the OFIS suite of applications. It must fully handle workflows for creating expense claims, processing expense claims (approval or rejection decisions), hand-off / export expense claim data to other systems, and generate reports from the data. The policy and procedure for the new Expense Claim process has already been reviewed and established. Proposals Please refer to the attached Terms of Reference (TOR) for additional details; you may ask for clarification on any of the contents of the TOR in order to provide an accurate proposal. Please respond with a technical and financial proposal including your understanding of the project, a suggested timeline (if different from the anticipated work plan included in the TOR), and total fee for completing the project according to the proposed timeline.