Monday Matters
This issue of Monday Matters is primarily written for those who have the authority or oversight over one or more College financial accounts. (If you don't have an account, feel free to “listen in” anyway.) As I hope every member of the faculty and staff knows by now, departments and offices now have the responsibility to set up their own budgets as well as the authority to charge expenses to these budgets. Although it has taken some time to work out the bugs in this system, I still believe it is the best approach and that this approach has been paying dividends. I have noticed departments and offices becoming quite efficient and careful in their spending policies. Just as importantly, College financial appropriation decisions are made in a rational a priori manner rather than as a response to ongoing and individual funding requests.
New Online Budget System
Over the summer the Information Technology office rolled out a new version of our online budgeting system. This version of the system is very stable and is much improved over the previous version. The system allows each department chair and office director to not only view their summary budget at any time via the web, but you can also click on any income or expense category to see the itemized entries for that category. It takes two business days from the time the Business Office receives an income or expense notification until the time that this is posted to the online budget system, so your budget should always be very current. If you ever notice any mistakes, feel free to contact Steve Mattison. He is as concerned (or more so) as you that your budget is current and accurate.
The budget system can be accessed from the business office web page at:
http://www.ed.sc.edu/businessoffice/business.asp
One feature of the new version of the budget system that is not obvious is that you now have the ability to publish a summary form of the budget on the web so that others in your department or office (or anyone who has web access) can see your budget. This is a handy feature for departments who wish to keep faculty members apprised of the budget at all times. The summary version of the budget does not contain access to individual category income or expense reports so that information that is personal and confidential (e.g. individual salaries) are not accessible. For more information on using this feature or to have a link added to your web page that links to this summary of your budget contact David Michaels.
Hidden Recurring Charges
Even though we have tried to put the responsibility for all expenditures on the person in the department or office with budget authority, there have been monthly recurring charges that are made by the College or the University without any explicit approval from the budget authority. These include charges made at the services center, telephone charges, postage charges, and printing charges. In the past these charges have been posted directly to the University system without any checks, in some cases, without any explicit approval from someone in the department.
To address this problem, I've worked with the Business Office and the Information Technology office to come up with a system that will provide department chairs and office directors the opportunity to authorize these monthly expenses. Each month, on or around the 15th of the month, chairs and directors will receive an e-mail from the Business Office reminding you that is time to check recurring charges for the previous month. For example, the first reminder message will be sent out within the next day or two and will ask you to check charges for the month of July. We wait until the middle of August to ask you to check charges for the month of July because it takes about that long for some of the charges to appear in the University systems. You will have until the end of the month to verify and approve charges for the previous month.
To make this transition as easy as possible, David Michaels has provided online tutorials that can be accessed from the Business Office web page. There is a separate tutorial for each of the systems that you will need to access in order to check monthly charges. Also on the same web page you will find a link to each of the four systems. If you have any trouble accessing the systems, for example if the system does not recognize your username, contact David. If you have any trouble using the system or understanding the tutorials, contact the Instructional Support Training Center. Susan Quinn and her staff will be happy to assist you.
There several bits of information that you need to keep in mind when working with the University systems. First let me tell you about usernames and passwords. The username and password that is used for the telephone charges system is the same as the one that you use for your GroupWise mail account. The username and password that is used for the Services Center system is the same as the one that is used for the budget system. The username and password that you use to access postage charges is your OnDemand username and password. Finally, the password that is used for the printing system is a single password that is used for every account. Please write an e-mail to David Michaels to obtain that password. I would like to publish it here, but since the password is controlled by the printing office I do not have the authority to publish their password on a public web page.
There is one other peculiarity about the printing office web pages. These pages use account numbers, but not fund numbers. Therefore, if your account number is shared with other offices, you will be viewing the printing charges for all of those offices. I went online to look at 15200, which is the account number that is used by the Dean's office as well as a number of other offices in the College. I found that it was pretty easy to sort out the printing charges that were mine. You can look at the names of the individuals who submitted the printing request and figure out pretty quickly whether the charges are yours. Also keep in mind that the printing charges cover multiple months, so you simply need to look for those charges on which the end date for the printing job corresponds to the month that you are checking for. For instance, when you check charges during the next week or two, you will look for printing jobs that were completed in July.
After you look at all four of the systems and verify the charges, it is time for you to confirm that the information is correct. That is done using the online budget system for the College. Log onto the budget system and access the account for which you wish to agree to the charges. At the bottom of the page you will see the word “commit.” Click on commit. For each of the four types of charges you will have the opportunity to indicate whether you accept the charges as they appear in the University system or whether you will accept them after discrepancies are corrected. There is space in each of these categories for you to list discrepancies. After listing the discrepancies and committing to the charges, fill in your verification e-mail address and submit. This information will then be conveyed to the Business Office. If all of the charges are accepted, the Business Office staff will add these charges to your account in the online College budget system. If there any discrepancies, the staff will work with you to address these problems with the University.
This verification is a mandatory monthly exercise. I ask you to take it seriously for several reasons. First of all, since we started establishing the system and started reviewing accounts to see how it would work, we found a number of errors with the University system. Use this system as a way to make sure that the charges that are being made to your department or office are actually your charges and not someone else's. Note that the University automatically charges each telephone to certain account. In testing the system we found telephones that were not being charged to the right account. If you notice this for your department, please work with Steve Mattison to see that this information is changed in the University system. We want them to correct the problem so that you do not have to keep reporting a discrepancy each month.
Another use of the system that I hope departments take full advantage of is having grant charges being transferred from department accounts. When you look on the system and see phone calls, postage, printing, or copying charges that should be for grants but have been charged to the department account, you can list these as a discrepancy and ask to have these charges moved to the correct account. We are working on a system so that the staff in grants offices can quickly relay this information to you, but in the meantime I recommend that departments establish their own temporary systems to do this. When a grant expense is charged to the College, we essentially pay for it twice. First, the department has to pay for an expense that normally it would not have. Second, the money that should have been used from the grant for this expense is not used. More often than not, this money is returned to the funding agency. It is like getting charged twice for the same mistake. Please use the new expense commitment system to help address this problem.
Identifying Budget Categories
One benefit of using an internal budget system is that every department and office can create its own budget categories. This helps make the system user friendly, but it also can be problematic for the staff in the Business Office. There are so many budget categories in the College that it is difficult for them identify where to put income or expense entries. This is where you come in. Please make sure that every expense sheet that is sent to the Business Office, including credit card expense sheets, lists the category in your budget that you want to be charged. Do this by writing the information right on the paper or electronic form. This is safer than attaching a note because attachments can easily be lost. For every expense, simply indicate the budget category that should be used for that expense. This will help us meet the goal of having budget information posted to the online system within two business days after receipt of the information.
I hope that the updated version of the budget system is one that you will use frequently for tracking your accounts. I have already found it to be very helpful for tracking all College accounts. It is, in fact, the only system I use. I don't use University financial systems except the ones described above to verify monthly expenditures.
Please take seriously the responsibility that you have to maintain your accounts. The Business Office will post and process the information, but you need to tell them which category to use. You also need to confirm that recurring charges are posted to the correct account, including grant accounts. When individual budgets are “healthy,” the collective financial health of the College improves.
Until next time,
Mike