Leaders at UCDHSC no longer support the show-one-number concept of the m-Fin SIMPLE SPEEDTYPE QUERY, what we have been calling the SSQ AVAILABLE BALANCE.  This amount is meant to be the money available that is not already reserved for other purposes.

To the question “can’t you just show me the amount I have available to spend” they essentially answer “no, because we cannot provide a certain answer, particularly for non-general funds”.

UCDHSC proposes showing before and after encumbrance amounts, and perhaps some other context, and leaving it to the user to decide how much should be considered available.

I am reluctant to do away completely with the SSQ AVAILABLE BALANCE calculation because it has been so well received on the Boulder and UCCS campuses.  Quite a bit of work was done attempting to make the calculation appropriate for all funds.  So I am prototyping variations of the Simple Speedtype Query that still do show SSQ AVAILABLE BALANCE but can optionally show more.  I am trying to do this with minimal or no changes to the m-Fin OPERATING SUMMARY.  With some luck perhaps we can get something that works reasonably well for everyone.