hsufinuser

Purchase Orders with a remaining encumbrance that have been fully received and matched, and that were created between 7/1/04 and 11/30/04, have been closed (fully liquidated). Purchase Orders created in December will be closed Monday, April 4. Buyers will review Purchase Orders created in January and February that meet the above criteria before they are closed on April 15. As we progress, there will be fewer and fewer Purchase Orders with a remaining encumbrance due to a finalization process run in Accounts Payable.

Thank you.

Joyce Baltierra
Contracts and Procurement

Effective yesterday, we have reorganized the way we deliver training in PS Finance to be more efficient with our time and yours. Instead of offering a single monthly general training of 3-4 hours, plus weekly drop-ins for existing users, we are merging them to provide a series of five different 2-hour training modules. The modules will be offered one per week over a five-week repeating cycle.

The five modules are:

• Chart of Accounts
• Navigation
• Account Management
• HR
• Analysis Tools

For more information on class content and schedules, see the new Training links on our Fiscal Web pages at http://www.humboldt.edu/~fiscal/topics/psfin/psfin.html. We also intend to send out weekly email reminders to the hsufinuser list.

The only requirement for any of these classes is that new inquiry users must take the Navigation training in order to get access to PS Finance. All other offerings are completely open: there is no registration, seating is first come first serve up to the capacity of the room, and users may attend any sessions they like in whatever order. The logical progression of the classes is in the order above.

Please note:

• The Tuesday afternoon one-on-one drop-in sessions will no longer be offered. For the first month, the scheduled trainings will be offered at that time slot instead.
• New users will no longer be required to take the San Jose pre-training online tutorial.
• All new user requests for inquiry access and registration should now be routed through Fiscal Affairs (attn Katherine Granfield).
• Kathleen Forsburg has promised online handouts for her Analysis Tools students; these have not yet been published to the Web, but will be available soon.
• Requisition entry training will continue to be offered independently of this cycle.

Denise Isaac has announced that February 2005 (FY 2004 Period 8) is now closed; no further entries will be posted to this period.

Also, telecommunications budget has been posted to Finance in March. You should now be able to see this budget in your HUMGL005 & HUMGL015 reports, when run on period 9.

We have modified three departmental queries to limit their results to actuals only:

HUM_AAA_GL_DEPT_POSTAGE
HUM_AAA_GL_DEPT_TELECOMM
HUM_AAA_GL_DEPT_TRAVEL

These queries were previously selecting all journal lines for the respective account category, thus mingling lines for budget with actual expenditures.

To emphasize this, we have also modified the queries cosmetically: both by including the ledger field (i.e., “ACTUALS”) in the query results, and by adding “Exp” to the query descriptions.

Thanks to the Academic Affairs Budget Liaisons for bringing this to our attention.

We have modified the HUM_AAA_GL_DEPT_HUMGL015 query (departmental transaction detail, parallel to the HUMGL015 report) to prompt for a range of accounting periods, rather than a single period. This will allow users to gather transaction detail more efficiently. It is still possible to run on a single period by entering the same period in both the From and To Period prompts.

Please note that with the potentially larger query result comes an increased possibility of exceeding Query’s data return limits. If this happens when you are running a query via the Run link, which opens a separate result window, you will get a popup with the “Query Result Set too Large” error message. However, if this happens when you are running a query in the same window by simply clicking on the query name, you will not get a prominent error message; the “Query Result Set too Large” message will appear at the bottom of the initial result page, requiring you to scroll in order to see it. You should be aware of this when using the query and interpreting your results.

Also, we may have failed to note when we first provided this query that it contains a column not found in the report: the “Query/Row Num” column on the far right. This field is a unique row identifier added for technical reasons, to make the query perform correctly; it is of no significance to you.

A new query is available in PS Finance (Query Viewer) that provides a YTD summary of travel expenditures for a given department:

HUM_AAA_GL_DEPT_TRAVEL

This query summarizes posted journal lines by dept, fund, account, and period, for all travel expenditure accounts.

Also, two similar existing queries on postage and telecommunications expenditures have now been fixed to display only HMCMP business unit activity:

HUM_AAA_GL_DEPT_POSTAGE
HUM_AAA_GL_DEPT_TELECOMM

These queries were previously unrestricted on business unit, effectively causing some amounts to appear more than once.

Just a warning that all three queries select ledger-posted actuals activity only, which is subtly different from the selection criterion for the HUMGL005 & HUMGL015 reports. The reports select activity which has been budget-checked, an earlier step in the accounting process, meaning that at any given time during the day you might see items appearing in the reports that haven’t yet been posted to the actuals ledger, and thus would not appear in the queries. The queries will be consistent with a ledger inquiry run on the ACTUALS ledger.

The HUMGL005 & HUMGL015 use the different criterion in order to remain internally consistent among encumbrances and actuals. Encumbrances march to a different drummer: commitment control budget-checking, rather than journal posting.

You should now be able to run reports in PS Finance. Though we have had no official word from CMS Central on this morning’s problem, reports seem to be running normally again.

All reports (SQRs) seem to be failing this morning in PS Finance. We’re logging a help ticket with CMS Central, as it appears to be a central server issue. We’ll try and keep everyone posted on the progress of this, but for now you will be unable to run your reports.

I’m publishing the following recent enduser question and answer as a useful refresher on document lookup from the HUMGL015. See also our newly enhanced PSFin Web pages at http://www.humboldt.edu/~fiscal/topics/psfin/psfin.html, in particular the links on Reviewing Your Departmental Financials, Understanding the HUMGL015, and About Inquiries.

Q:

When I am in the Query HUM_AAA_GL_DEPT_HUMGL015 and I get the dept. information for the period, how do I retrieve a specific document? As an example, in D20054 period 6 there is a line for Newark in one with a Doc ID of 00007305 and a Jrnl ID of AP00001559. Is there any way to see this document?

A:

1. Regarding the Doc ID field: look to the column just before it to see what type of document the ID refers to. In this case, the Doc Type is “VCHR”, meaning voucher; so this is a voucher number, and you can use the Voucher Inquiry page in PS to look up this voucher # (via Accounts Payable-Review-Vouchers-Voucher Inquiry). Just type in, or copy-paste, the ID number 00007305 into the “From Voucher ID” in the Search Criteria on that page, and press Search. You could also look up the voucher via the voucher Document Status page, in the same folder (via Accounts Payable-Review-Vouchers-Document Status). Just type or paste the voucher ID# into the Voucher ID field on the search page, and press Search. This will give you access through links not only to the voucher info, but to all the documents in the purchasing pathway for this voucher: the requisition, purchase order, shipping receipt, and payment. So this might actually be the highest-value way to do your document lookup.
2. Regarding the Jrnl ID field: similarly, you can look this up via the Journal Inquiry page in PS (via General Ledger-Review Journal/Ledger Data-Journals). But the journal search is more complicated — you have to build an inquiry, and then find the specific line within that journal that contains your transaction — in this case, line 133, according to the Jrnl Ln column just to the right of the Jrnl ID in your HUMGL015. And, it’s probably of less relevance to you as an enduser, unless you have some problem with how this item actually got into the ledger. The journal references in the HUMGL015 are more likely to be of interest to the Accounting department, if they’re trying to research something.

We have completed our overhaul of the Fiscal Web pages in support of PS Finance with a second installment of enhancements. New with these last changes are:

• Current status of accounting periods
• Extensive commentaries on departmental accounting
• Navigation tips
• HR payroll tutorial

The main page for PS Finance information is http://www.humboldt.edu/~fiscal/topics/psfin/psfin.html. (Or, from the Fiscal Affairs home page at ~fiscal in the Humboldt domain, take the PS Finance link under What’s New.)