Budget Preparation/Management - College
The College budget has been redesigned with the same principles of VCM that have been adopted by the University. Each unit within the College, both academic departments and non-academic offices, has been given a monetary allocation and been asked to create a budget based on that allocation. Each department and all offices are being asked to work within the confines of their budgets. That is, all of the money that was allocated to the College at the start of the fiscal year has been appropriated to departments and offices.
Accessing Your Budget
To access your budget, to the Business Office web page.
Click on "COE Budgets" and then your department or office name. You will be prompted for a username and password. All users will need a user name and password to access approved accounts. You can now view your current spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet has four columns. The first column shows your expense budget for the new fiscal year. These values should match the appropriation you gave to each budget category. The second column is where your actual expenses will be recorded. New fiscal year expenditures will be entered for a total annual amount and will be kept current thereafter. When expenses are recorded, the balance in the fourth column will be reduced accordingly so that you can view the allocation that remains in this category in your budget.
The third column in your budget is the income column of the spreadsheet. Initial income entries reflect your base appropriation. Additional income will be reflected as you generate this income. Income categories could include your unit's portion of salary savings when individuals work on grants, revenues from teaching an extended graduate campus course, or income from other entrepreneurial programs that you may run. If you built your base budget on an assumption of generating some income, this information was used to permit you to create an expense column that is larger than your base appropriation. Your projected income will not appear on your initial spreadsheet, but will appear when you actually generate that income.
The available funds row on the very bottom of the spreadsheet is literally just that. This is your income, including your initial base allocation, minus your actual expenditures.
There is one very important difference between our internal budgeting system and the university budgeting system. In the university system, salary is only charged as an expense after the employee is paid. That is, individual salaries appear as a series of expenses throughout the year. In contrast, the College system lumps all expenses and anticipated expenses (known within the University system as "commitments") and charges these as an up-front expense. For example, if you have a full-time staff member at a specified annual salary, then we will soon be charging this annual salary to your budget. As another example, when you submit a travel authorization form the approved expenditures will be immediately charged as expenses, rather than as commitments. If the individual who makes this travel does not use all of the money that was initially charged as an expense, then when the travel reimbursement voucher is submitted your expense column will be adjusted. The basic idea here is that in order for you to have a better indicator of your department or office budget, we will charge all expenses both real and anticipated.
Budget Categories
the budget is broken into two main categories: operating budget and income sources. Below is a brief line-by-line description of each line within each category.
Operating Budget
Service Assessment: This is what the University charges us for services that they provide. These services are numerous and extensive, but include central administration, grounds and maintenance, custodial services, and technology services.
Budget Allocations: This is the total of allocations to the College departments.
GA Tuition Credits: This is the money that we have set aside to pay tuition credits for our graduate assistants. "A Fund" tuition credits represent recurring dollars that we can use to support graduate assistants that are paid from our regular budgets. Grant-related tuition credits are drawn from a one-time money source and will pay tuition credits for students that are hired with grant funds. These dollars will not be available after this year, so we must ask external funding agencies for tuition money when we submit funding proposals.
Summer School Expenses: This is our estimate of how much it cost to offer summer courses this year.
Income Sources
Tuition Revenue: This is the University's estimate of how much tuition revenue we will generate during the upcoming academic year.
Summer Revenue: This is our estimate of the gross revenue we earned by offering summer courses this year.
State Appropriation: State funds continue to be an important component of public university budgets. This is the portion of State funds that are allocated to the College by the University.
State Below-the-Line Appropriation: This is money that the State provides for the African American Professors Program.
Grant GA Tuition Credits Allocation: These are the one-time monies provided by the University to pay for tuition credits for grant-related graduate assistants.
Carry Forward: This is the amount of money from our budget that we did not spend last year. Although you may think that this indicates that the College is in good fiscal shape because there was money left at the end of last year, consider that we had to use this money to balance the budget this year, just as we did last year. That is, each year we generate revenue from grants, contracts, the Extended Graduate Campus, and other income sources. We have had to set aside approximately $750,000 of that money just to be able to balance the budget the following year. If these sources of revenue dried up, we would be in big trouble. Similarly, now that much of our revenue is being allocated directly to departments, the "College reserve" will not be nearly as large as it has been in the past. This means that it is up to departments to save money so that they can balance their budgets in future years, just as the College has done in the past.
Salary Reimbursement: We start this at zero and then use salary savings from grants and contracts to build a reserve that we can use to balance the budget.
Extended Graduate Campus Revenue: This works the same as salary reimbursement, but the source of revenue is income generated through the EGC.
Other Revenue: The sources of these revenue can vary, with the primary source being money contributed to the College foundation.
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.
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.
Online tutorials are available 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.
There several bits of information that you need to keep in mind when working with the University systems. 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. Write an e-mail to the COE Director of Information Technology to obtain that password.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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 the COE Business Manager 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 departments can 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 departments should 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. Use the new expense commitment system to help address this problem.
Identifying Budget Categories
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. This designation SHOULD NOT BE in the area designed for university information but may be anywhere else on the form. 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.