If there’s a phrase many of us dread, it’s “Please provide your COA.” A COA (or Chart of Accounts string) is that alphanumeric mashup required for university purchasing, but not easy to remember. The Financial Management & Reporting Task Force has developed a way to help those using Project Portfolio Management (PPM) accounts quickly generate a full COA with only a Project & Task! Additionally, if a principal investigator (PI) is assigned to a project, that information will auto-populate! Finally, effective with this release, all purchase requests that use this enhancement will now require a COA at the time of submission.
Beginning today (April 26), this new COA selection tool will be deployed to only “CBS2 - General Purchasing” requests made via the DFA Service Hub. When selecting the option to add a COA, you will see a window that contains “Project” and “Task” search fields. Simply find your project code and select your task. The full COA (and PI if applicable) will generate automatically. Also, General Ledger (GL) COAs can now be entered directly in a single field instead of segment by segment.
We hope this enhancement will significantly improve the purchasing experience, but we want to hear from you! Individuals submitting new purchase requests for the first several weeks will receive a simple survey. We would love your feedback to help refine this new feature before it is deployed to other DFA Service Portal requests.
