Development of a web platform for financial management of researchers

Abstract

Bureaucracy in the processes that involve the financial management of researchers is one of the main obstacles that affects the time and the expenditures destined to research activities. The accountability process, although it is of fundamental importance to guarantee the transparency of public and private investments in research, should not take much time away from the researcher's final activity, which is to do Science and generate knowledge and technologies. Fapesp's accountability, for example, requires that multiple actions of the researcher be taken to generate expense reports that prove and justify expenditures over the lifetime of the project. This rule, in addition to taking the researcher's time, which could be being allocated in research activities, contributes to the generation of a large volume of data that is stored in its physical form. In order to avoid this problem, the Easy Contas web platform was designed during Startup Weekend São Carlos, winning the competition in second place. The proposal of this platform is to automate the actions of researchers during the process of preparing the accountability report, thus reducing the time spent with these bureaucratic activities. Therefore, the objective of this project is to evaluate the technical feasibility of Easy Contas as a solution that facilitates the financial management of research projects. Design Thinking, Scrum and Extreme Programming methodologies will be used for the process of idea generation, team activity management and software development, respectively. The progressive refinement of the functionalities will be done with the aid of feedback from volunteer researchers located in the State of São Paulo and inserted in different levels of productivity in research and in different areas of knowledge. At the end of the project we hope to get a fully functional integrated web-mobile prototype capable of generating expense reports quickly and easily. (AU)