Introduction To m-Fin Blog
m-Fin is a set of CU management financial reports created in CU’s Cognos software. I use m-Fin Blog to communicate about the m-Fin reports, covering topics such as:
- revisions to the m-Fin reports
- new reports under development
- useful Cognos features that are not readily apparent
- the thinking behind m-Fin design decisions
- ideas for new features.
A single university-wide reporting solution
One of the top priorities of the Office of University Controller (OUC) is to improve the usability and efficiency of the Cognos Reporting System in its delivery of financial information, and to thereby create a single university-wide reporting solution. m-Fin (pronounced as the letter M and the fin of a fish) stands for “management financial” and identifies Cognos content we have developed for this purpose.
CU-Data QA
An important function of m-Fin Blog is to announce testing. CU-Data QA is the Quality Assurance instance of CU’s Cognos software. This is where we test and make the go/no-go decision for migration to CU-Data production. If you have access to the production Finance folder you also have access to the QA Finance folder and can test drive new Cognos reports there.
By monitoring this blog and participating in testing, you'll know about changes before they happen in production.
Tips and tricks
New to Cognos? Try the the Tips and Tricks m-Fin Blog category. Look for it under CATEGORIES in the righthand blog column.
Comments
I have created a personal report in m-fin for monthly billing expenses for fund 35s for Children's. When setting properties it only allows to select speedtypes (a list of them) under prompt values. Is there any way to be able to enter prompt values for projects? When an account is reorged the system automatically creates that is inactive that holds the old FOPPS. Which has caused me to bill for expenses that have not actually occurred on the active ST with new FOPPS. If I could enter project instead it would capture true expenses on the account. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
We don't have many reports that accept multiple project id's. You can run for a single project id and this will handle the re-org. If you need to run for multiple at once then a work-around is to enter a project id and then search speedtypes for the first digit of your campus speedtypes. For a re-org'd project both speedtypes are returned. Insert both of them. Keep doing this for all the projects you need. If there are quite a few and you'll be doing the same batch of them every month try saving the list of inserted speedtypes in a Cognos report view. For more about this look in the Tips and Tricks category in this blog for the post "Save Your Own Preset Prompt Values."