PGEnet implements three basic functions:
- Generation of the official documentation for the draft State Budget Law submitted by Government to Parliament, and for the law subsequently passed by Parliament, based on the numerical information obtained online from the budgeting and documentary information systems uploaded by those responsible for them. PGEnet generates electronic information that can be found online as well as on other digital media (CD-ROMs and portable memory devices), and which is processed in the traditional way in print.
- Publication of other relevant documentation not included in the above, in a similar format to the official one, and the supply of mechanisms for users to perform parameterised queries of State Budget Law information.
- Provision of a past budgets record, which includes the information generated by the system and the scanning of official documentation produced before the system's implementation.
During budget drafting, PGEnet obtains data from the transactional budgeting applications – when queried – that it uses to build and format the output, providing each user with information for his/her specific area on the status of this data at that point in time and in the official format. After the draft budget has been presented to Parliament (or once the State Budget Law has been approved by Parliament), the system generates a "snapshot" allowing users to query all official documentation.
With regard to outputs, PGEnet can produce the results in a format ready for viewing (PDF), or in a format that can be processed by office tools (HTML).
As one of its milestones, PGEnet has unified the procedures for the digital and paper publishing of State Budget Law documentation, integrating processes that were previously carried out manually, thus reducing generation time while improving the quality of the end product.