Airmen earn USSOCOM top financial management award Published June 7, 2014 By Senior Airman Claire Behney 193rd Special Operations Wing Middletown, Pa. -- No stranger to the concept of teamwork, three Airmen from the 193rd Special Operations Wing recently earned a top financial management award for their efforts in joining forces to tackle a funding and manpower challenge. Senior Master Sgt. Denise Teats, 193rd Comptroller Flight budget analyst; Staff Sgt. Megan Brown, 193rd Human Resources remote office HR assistant; and Senior Airman Kaitie Cook, 193rd HRO HR assistant, created a succinct unit to coordinate and track personnel action that involved work year execution resulting in on time and on target work year execution rates and ensuring the Wing was audit ready. This work resulted in the team being presented the U.S. Southern Command 2013 Innovations to Financial Management Process-Civilian Pay Manpower Team award. "In today's fiscally constrained environment, managing our resources efficiently is of paramount importance and this team's efforts were a key component to our success," said Col. John Dickinson, 193rd SOW commander. Sergeant Teats created accounting reports that pulled data from Command Resource Information System, Unit Manning Documents, Manpower Resource Vouchers, and the Defense civilian pay system. This information was then converted to accurately account for work year execution rates and was captured every pay period and detailed all funding lines in order to effectively compare to target execution rates. The HRO team of Sergeant Brown and Airman Cook created various tracking spreadsheets with Air Personal Management Report data and the duty status of members - and together this CPT and HRO team tracked all permanent, indefinite and temporary technicians' personnel actions. They also established controls to track retirements, separations, transfers, and movement between multiple funding lines, which kept track of authorized positions against executed positions. "We were able to produce and create tracking tools to better help us forecast position availability," said Sergeant Teats. "By striving to make the process more like a science we can provide leadership the tools to make a more educated decision." This tool they created gave them something they were able to take to the commander, at their monthly manpower meetings, to show how positions were tracking. Sergeant Teats said she attributes the success of this endeavor to open lines of communication between the two offices. "We had such a good working relationship that it resulted in great communication between the teams."