AFIMSC seeks submissions for Financial Management Innovation Rodeo

Published March 6, 2026
AFIMSC Financial Management Directorate

JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, Texas – The Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center is seeking entries from across the Department of the Air Force for a financial management “Shark Tank”-like competition.

Total Force financial management teams can submit their best practices, innovative tools, and game-changing ideas for the inaugural AFIMSC Financial Management Innovation Rodeo through March 30. The theme of the contest is “Harvesting Our Best Ideas.”

FM Innovation Rodeo graphic — The Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center is seeking entries from across the Department of the Air Force for a financial management “Shark Tank”-like competition. (U.S. Air Force graphic)

“As we’ve seen over the last two years, there continues to be great ideas in the field that simply need a little help from us to speed improvements in DAF readiness,” said Col. Bob Clay, interim director of AFIMSC Financial Management. “By fielding these creative innovations through automating processes, our Airmen and Guardians can focus more time on honing their warfighting skills, while saving taxpayer dollars through improved efficiencies.”

Based on the FM Directorate team’s DAF-wide view across 83 installations, AFIMSC has been able to field several grassroots innovations in collaboration with Air Force comptroller squadrons over the past few years. The team follows the mantra of Harvest-Standardize-Deploy in its approach to making great base ideas great Air Force-wide capabilities.

Two recent examples are the launches of Qtrac and the Command Triad Application. Qtrac started at Hurlburt Field, Florida, as an idea for customer service queueing and appointment scheduling. It is now an enterprise-wide way of doing business following the AFIMSC partnership with the 1st Special Operations CPTS and 502nd CPTS to scale and deploy the platform across the DAF.

The Command Triad Application that provides commanders, senior enlisted leaders and first sergeants with Airmen and Guardian critical financial health and readiness data began with the ingenuity of Airmen at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, and Misawa AB, Japan, before also being further developed and scaled for global use at AFIMSC.

“We have seen the incredible impact of ideas that originate at base level,” said Angie Trego, AFIMSC Financial Operations Division chief. “The standup of the FM Innovation Rodeo competition now formalizes a process we plan to conduct annually by casting a DAF-wide net and publicizing the opportunity Airmen, Guardians and civilians have to make significant and lasting FM program improvements.”

People interested in entering the AFIMSC FM Innovation Rodeo can do so by following the three steps below. A DoW-issued Common Access Card is required to access the sites.

1. Create an account on Platform One at https://login.dso.mil/register. If a prompt to create a password appears, there is no need to do so since the CAC is the authenticator. If a person already has an account, there is also no need to create another one (and the site won't allow it).

2. Create an account in the Guardians and Airmen Innovation Network (GAIN) at https://gain.il4.afwerx.dso.mil and complete the registration fields.

3. Access the campaign’s direct login at https://gain.il4.afwerx.dso.mil/daf/afimsc-financial-innovation-rodeo-2026. Read the overview and instructions, click “Submit Your Idea,” and follow the prompts to complete the entry and join the competition.

“In the spirit of competition, please provide as much detail as possible, to include attachments, in support of your idea, because the next step is evaluation,” said Kurt Schmidbauer, AFIMSC Financial Operations Division technical advisor and rodeo project officer.

Here’s the rest of the rodeo timeline following the March 30 entry deadline:

March 31 to April 12: A panel of leaders from Air Force headquarters, major commands, AFIMSC and base-level subject matter experts evaluate submissions and select four finalists.
April 13: AFIMSC announces four finalists.
April 14 to May 10: Finalists prepare for the in-person competition.
May 11: Finalists present their ideas to a panel of in-person judges at AFIMSC in San Antonio with FMers from across the DAF joining on Teams to ask questions about each pitch.
May 26: Announcement of the winner at the Defense Financial Management Institute Service Day in Orlando.

Schmidbauer said being able to conduct an innovation competition of this magnitude was made possible through a strong partnership with the Guardians and Airmen Innovation Network. GAIN is the DAF’s innovation knowledge management and collaboration platform. It enables leaders to solve problems and explore opportunities through direct engagement with frontline innovators from all ranks of the force.

For more information about the AFIMSC FM Innovation Rodeo, email AFIMSC.FMF.FinancialMgtWorkfl@us.af.mil.