Summary: Yonyou Government Affairs assisted the Guizhou Provincial Forestry Bureau in building an integrated forestry project repository management platform, using performance targets as the "baton" to connect the entire process of project reserve, application, execution, and completion, resolving the disconnect between project budgets and performance management, and achieving three-tier coordination across province, city, and county levels with full-process accountability for funds.

Every June marks a critical window period for concentrated applications for forestry projects in Guizhou. In the past, the silviculture section of the Wangmo County Forestry Bureau in Qianxinan Prefecture would enter a busy "overtime season for submission and review." Paper materials piled up like mountains, data was manually verified item by item, and standards were repeatedly unified. Once there were non-standard indicators or mismatched data, back-and-forth submissions and rework often took more than half a month.

The traditional manual submission model was inefficient, lacked consistent standards, and offered weak oversight. This was a widespread problem that had long plagued grassroots forestry project management and a key bottleneck in implementing fiscal budget performance management.

To address issues such as non-standard forestry project reserves, unsynchronized budget performance, and disconnection between business and finance, the Guizhou Provincial Forestry Bureau took digital fiscal construction as an opportunity and relied on an integrated forestry project repository management system to build a four-dimensional interconnected full-lifecycle management system covering "reserve—application—execution—completion." Through institutional standardization, online processes, intelligent oversight, and clarified responsibilities, it thoroughly reversed the "two separate systems" situation between forestry projects and budget management, achieving precise reserve, standardized use, and full-process accountability for forestry fiscal funds.

Building a Solid Foundation with Standards

"Informatization is not simply moving offline processes online. Without unified standards, even the best system is a castle in the air," admitted the project lead of the Finance Division of the Guizhou Provincial Forestry Bureau. At the start of the project repository construction, the biggest pain point was not technology, but the lack of standards.

Before 2021, the application and aggregation of more than 2,000 forestry projects and hundreds of millions in funds across the province relied entirely on manual reporting level by level. Application standards varied widely across different regions and business lines, and performance targets were even more diverse—some wrote "improve the ecological environment," others wrote "enhance forest quality"—making horizontal comparison impossible and quantitative assessment difficult. At the same time, business departments widely held the misconception that "performance management is the finance department's job." Project applications emphasized approval over performance, and the responsibility mechanism of "whoever spends the money is accountable for its effectiveness" was always difficult to implement. On one side, the finance department struggled without unified standards, making data aggregation and review difficult; on the other side, business departments viewed performance as an extra burden and filled in forms arbitrarily. The "language barrier" between business and finance grew thicker and thicker.

With the dual opportunities of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration comprehensively advancing project reserve repository construction and the Guizhou Provincial Department of Finance continuously deepening the construction of the budget expenditure standards system, the Guizhou Provincial Forestry Bureau followed the approach of "institutions first, standards leading" and built a set of institutional frameworks covering the entire process: in 2020, it issued the "Implementation Measures for Budget Performance Management of Forestry and Grassland Fiscal Funds in Guizhou Province (Trial)" and supporting operating procedures, clarifying for the first time the performance management responsibilities of all levels and departments, detailing workflow milestones, and breaking the inherent perception that "performance belongs to finance" at the institutional level; in 2021, it simultaneously established a forestry industry performance target indicator library to provide unified references for performance applications of different types of projects; in 2023, it officially issued the "Budget Expenditure Standards System for Overall Departmental Project Expenditures of the Guizhou Provincial Forestry Bureau (Trial)," clarifying budget expenditure standards and core performance targets for different types of projects, achieving a one-to-one correspondence among "expenditure direction—investment standard—performance indicators."

"After the standards system was implemented, the application elements and indicator standards for the same type of project were all unified. The system can automatically match corresponding standards, and grassroots units only need to fill in core data. Not only was aggregation efficiency greatly improved, but data quality was also fundamentally guaranteed," said the finance lead of the Qiandongnan Prefecture Forestry Bureau. This "1+N" institutional and standards matrix not only gave project repository construction rules to follow and evidence to rely on, but also broke down the barriers between business and finance, laying the foundation for subsequent deep business-finance integration.

Four-Dimensional Interconnection Resolves the "Two Separate Systems" of Project Budgeting

Under the traditional model, the root cause of the "two separate systems" of project management and budget management was the lack of a unified carrier running through the entire lifecycle. The digital project repository system was precisely the core lever for solving this problem.

In 2021, the Guizhou Provincial Forestry Bureau launched the first phase of the project repository and budget performance management system, taking the lead in piloting at the provincial level and directly affiliated units, and building core modules such as project reserve, budget preparation, performance target management, and dynamic monitoring; in 2022, the second phase of the system was comprehensively expanded, extending vertically to forestry departments in all 9 cities (prefectures) and 88 counties (cities, districts) across the province, thoroughly connecting the data links across province, city, and county levels; in 2023, with the introduction of the budget expenditure standards system, the system was iteratively upgraded again, deeply embedding standards and rules into the underlying logic, achieving automatic data population, intelligent validation, and rigid constraints for application data.

A relevant person in charge of a grassroots forestry bureau told reporters that in the past, after a project was approved, fund progress and construction progress were managed separately—business departments did not care how the money was spent, finance departments did not know what stage the project had reached, and performance self-evaluation relied entirely on finance "working behind closed doors," with data often disconnected from actual conditions. Now, this entire process has been moved online—when a project is entered into the reserve repository, the system automatically matches the corresponding budget standards and performance indicators, and prompts for correction on the spot if requirements are not met; city and county levels review online level by level, and provincial review takes only about a week to complete repository entry; after funds are allocated, the project enters the execution repository, business departments regularly upload progress data such as construction photos and afforestation area as well as fund payment information, and performance target completion is automatically calculated with lag warnings, truly achieving "visible progress, controllable funds, and trackable performance."

"The four-dimensional interconnected full-lifecycle management mechanism of 'reserve repository—application repository—execution repository—completion repository' has thoroughly broken the dilemma of the 'two separate systems' of projects and budgets," introduced the project lead of the Finance Division of the Guizhou Provincial Forestry Bureau. Today, 100% of all provincial-level forestry fiscal fund projects are selected from the project repository, truly implementing the rigid requirements of "enter the repository first, approve the project second; no budget, no expenditure." More importantly, the responsibility for performance management has shifted from being unilaterally borne by the finance department to full participation by business departments—each project's performance targets are filled in by the specific business handler, reviewed by the business section, and aggregated and verified by the finance department. The concept of "spending money must be accountable for results" has truly landed at every node of project management.

Data shows that after the system was fully applied, the cycle from project application to repository entry was compressed from more than one month to about one week, the data entry error rate was almost zero, and the system automatically intercepted over-standard and non-compliant applications, greatly improving the standardization and precision of project management from the source.

Province-City-County Coordination Advances to Connect the "Last Mile"

Poor computer skills, biased mindsets, frequent personnel changes causing handover gaps that affected application... In the initial stage of promoting the system across 130 covered units in the province, difficulties came one after another.

"Reform cannot rely only on administrative orders. We must let grassroots units truly feel the convenience and shift from 'making me use it' to 'I want to use it.'" To connect the "last mile" of implementation, the Guizhou Provincial Forestry Bureau established a regular consultation mechanism. The finance department proactively reached out to business departments, fully listened to frontline business needs, and jointly optimized system functions. At the same time, targeting personnel at different positions across province, city, and county levels, the bureau carried out specialized hands-on training in batches, simultaneously compiling visual operation guides and a knowledge base of common questions, translating complex financial terminology into expressions that business personnel could understand, ensuring that "one look and you know how, pick it up and you can use it." In response to the frequent personnel changes at the grassroots level, training materials and the knowledge base were always accessible, achieving "changing personnel without changing positions, changing personnel without reducing efficiency."

At the same time, the system continued to optimize the front-end experience to maximize burden reduction for grassroots units. "We try our best to change essay questions into multiple-choice questions and manual entry into automatic population," introduced the project lead of the Finance Division. The system established a strong association mechanism among "project category—expenditure subject—performance indicator." Grassroots personnel only need to select the project type, and the corresponding expenditure standards and performance indicators are automatically populated. There is no need to repeatedly verify standards, and accurate entry is possible even without professional financial knowledge.

Project repository construction is not the endpoint, but the starting point of Guizhou forestry financial digital transformation. Next, the Guizhou Provincial Forestry Bureau will continue to connect data interfaces with the integrated fiscal budget system to achieve automatic data synchronization; at the same time, it will explore the introduction of large model technology to carry out intelligent review, data analysis, and decision support, further unlocking the value of data elements and supporting the high-quality development of Guizhou forestry through digital governance.