Over the past two weeks, our team has continued to make progress on the Oracle Data Integrity Project. The alignment plans developed by our accounting team have proven to be very complex, resulting in a lot of extra effort on our team to rectify the data issues, many of which were driven by the lack of POET provision when conducting transactions over the past year. However, we currently have alignment plans for 65% of contracts and grants and 63% of internal funds.
We are holding on to the alignment plans for gifts and endowments as this will be conducted as part of the conversion process; however, 59% of them have already been corrected in the system. In addition, 21% of contracts and grants and 42% of our internal accounts have also been corrected in the system.
These numbers, the alignment plans, and corrections in the system will increase over the next couple of months as we complete the fiscal close. I am extremely thankful to our accounting alignment team, which has worked diligently to ensure that data flowing into the Oracle system is accurate and meets our system’s requirements.
On the budget alignment side, we have made considerable progress as we have alignment plans for 100% of the contracts and grants with known and identified discrepancies and 86% of those without known and identified discrepancies. In total, 89% of all contracts and grants have budget alignment plans in place.
Working with your RAs, we have corrected 61% of the budgets in the system for those with known discrepancies, and we will be advancing to those without known discrepancies as soon as these are complete. Our team is grateful for our partnership with your RAs, all of whom have been reviewing our budget alignment plans for accuracy.
Please keep in mind that both the accounting and budget reconciliation process must be completed in the system before you will see the changes. There are only a small number of instances where this is true at this time, and when this is complete, we will be sure to notify the research community.
Effective Friday, July 1, internally funded projects no longer require project portfolio management (PPM) attributes, commonly known as POET, for transactions in our Oracle-based financial management system. The goal of this change is to simplify the management of projects that do not have external billing or reporting requirements. Transactions include requisitions/purchase orders and invoices and expense management in Concur.
Historical data of the affected projects are accessible in the PPM sub-ledger and the general ledger, but all transactions going forward will live only in the general ledger. Please go here for answers to questions such as which projects are affected and how to access reports, get a new project value and make budget adjustments.
Please note, that this only relates to your internally funded projects (e.g., start-up, incidentals, etc..); all of your contracts and grants will continue to require a POET for financial transactions. However, this simplification, as well as some recent restructuring of workflow within DFA that we will announce in our upcoming newsletters, will allow our PPM team to better focus on our service of contracts and grants and your research directly.
Kurt Schnier
Vice Chancellor and interim Chief Financial Officer
