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Finance Division Daily Update – Dec. 5

 

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This Finance Division Daily Update email is for Business Managers, MOU Leads, Finance TIPs, Finance Campus Working Groups and Finance Division staff. Finance will send these daily updates as needed. Please share with the ConnectCarolina Finance users in your school/division.

Top Issues

  • New! Requesting a Retroactive Journal Entry: On Nov. 12, we communicated instructions for entering retroactive funding swaps in ConnectCarolina. While the retro functionality covers the majority of scenarios, the current design has limitations. The following charges cannot be retroed using an ePAR:
    • Non-regular salary (longevity, overtime, fringe benefits only, shift differential, etc.)
    • Charges incurred from Lump Sum payments
    • Charges on a vacant position
    • Charges for a period that have already been retroed (retro on a retro)
    • Charges for hourly employees that hit suspense due to low budget in the Department Budget Table

    Any necessary retros for these types of charges will be handled with a journal entry. A Request Form for Retroactive Journal Entries has been developed to assist campus with gathering the necessary information. These journal entries will have to be entered by a Finance Business Analyst.

    To request a journal entry, submit a remedy ticket and attach thecompleted journal entry form.

  • New! M05 and B10 Payroll Journals: Payroll journals for M05 and B10 have posted. Payroll actuals and liquidated encumbrances for M05 and B10 are available.
  • New! Web Travel/Campus Vouchers: We have received reports of a problem causing travelers to be confused about the status of their travel payments. The fix for this problem took place last night. Details are below.

    Since go-live, a field in ConnectCarolina called “PREPAID_AUTO_APPLY“ has been set to “Yes.” The result of this setting is that if a vendor (in this case a traveler) has an outstanding debt to the university, any subsequent voucher to pay that vendor is applied to reduce or eliminate the outstanding debt before any residual funds are sent to the vendor. As an example, if a traveler has a cash advance of $1,000 for an upcoming trip that will begin on Dec. 9, 2014, and the same traveler submits a travel reimbursement document for a prior trip that ended on November 21, 2014, and the reimbursement totals $400, the $400 will be used to reduce the outstanding amount of the cash advance to $600 and the traveler will not get an immediate payment for the Travel Reimbursement document that was submitted. The same thing would happen if a Campus Voucher was submitted for the traveler for $400 dollars.

    This setting makes it very difficult to reconcile expenses, but the good news is that in the end the traveler does get the proper aggregate amount due. While this is inconvenient, the payments will be resolved automatically.

    A change took place last night to update the “PREPAID_AUTO_APPLY“ field to “No” for all vouchers. The fix will eliminate this occurrence once any in-process vouchers are cleared out of the system.

  • November Month-End Close: Central Offices (OSR, Accounting Services and the Budget Office) should conclude processing November transactions this week and will ensure journals are posted if received by the deadline to be processed through departmental workflow which was November 24.
  • October Month-End Close: Central offices continue to work with State-level agencies to complete the transmission and reconciliation of all October transactions, and to obtain approval to officially close the month of October. Additional transactions to chart strings of campus departments for October are not anticipated.
  • ARP: The ARP data entry deadline is Monday, Dec. 8 at 5 p.m. Here are the statistics as of this morning. These are the actions that have written to the system (not including actions on hold):
    • 1,240 faculty job change actions (64 percent of planned)
    • 1,572 EPA non-faculty job change actions (97 percent of planned)
    • 2,679 lump sum actions (75 percent of planned)
  • System Availability Update: ConnectCarolina Finance and HR/Payroll system availability will be extended two hours per business day through Friday, Dec. 5 to support ARP efforts. Also, there will be no system down time this weekend. The regular system availability times will be reinstated for business days beginning Monday, Dec. 8. Following is the schedule for the next week:
    • Monday-Friday, Dec. 1-5 from 7 a.m. – 9 p.m.
    • Saturday, Dec. 6 from 3 a.m. through Midnight, Sunday, Dec. 7 (no system downtime)
    • Monday-Friday, Dec. 8-12 from 7 a.m. – 7 p.m. (revert to regular system hours)
    • Reminder: The deadline for completing ARP actions is 5 p.m. Dec. 8.

Important Reminders

  • CBM Demo: A Customer Billing Management (CBM) System and Bill Presentation Demo will take place Tuesday, Dec. 9 from 2 – 3 p.m. in Toy Lounge, Dey Hall.
  • Query Viewer: The recording of Wednesday’s webinar on Managing Finance Transactions Using Query Viewer is posted online.
  • ARP Assistance: The final optional daily ARP call will be Monday, Dec. 8 at 11:30 a.m., strictly for ARP questions and assistance. The School/Division TIPs have the dial-in information.
  • ViewStar: ViewStar will be decommissioned at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 10. When ViewStar is shut down the following legacy systems will no longer have access to attachments/images: ePro 8.9 Small Order Process, Web Travel, Web Vendor, Account Request, Check Request, and InDEPTh.
    • If there are any documents created in Account Request that you need copies of, you should access them and print them before 5 p.m. on Dec. 10, 2014. All the images in ViewStar have been migrated to ImageNow and are accessible in the Central Offices. We are working on defining processes.
    • In the meantime, users can access legacy account request/fund authority information by selecting the Finance Central link at the top right of the Finance Division homepage. From there, users should sign in and go to their Inbox. Then users should select Search UNC and then Account Request. Search by the old Department Number to view the requests.
    • Clarification: The above tip only applies to Account Requests/Fund Authorities that were originally created in the Account Request system which was deployed in 2007. Anything prior to that date is not affected by the decommissioning of ViewStar.

Questions

All technical questions should be directed to the Business Systems Help Desk at 919-962-HELP, or submitted via a help ticket online at help.unc.edu (select ConnectCarolina > ConnectCarolina Finance > the appropriate area of concern). Your help ticket will be answered by a team dedicated to working on Finance questions and issues. Business Systems Help Desk hours are 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Functional or business process questions – plus any tips you have to offer – can be added to the ConnectCarolina user discussion forums.
Suggestions for content can be emailed to janet_kelly-scholle@unc.edu.

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