On Wed, April 23, the OUC was pleased to host an Appreciation Event for instructors in our Continuing Professional Education (CPE) Program.
The program provides free CPE credit to the University’s certified public accountants (CPAs), as well as to those with certain other certifications (fraud examiner, etc.). It also offers no-cost professional development and training to employees who are not CPAs.
It’s back:Your guide to FYE do’s and dates.
Handily separated out by topic and timeframe, the InfoPacket provides processing details for assuring appropriate payment or accrual to FY 2014. New this year: expanded detail on what you should expect to see on your financial statements.
Description: When a personal expense is charged on a Procurement/Travel card, the charge should be allocated to account 013109, and the reimbursement should be deposited to the same ST and same account 013109, so the charge and deposit could offset to zero. However, in the real world, these are frequently not processed to the same ST/acct. As a result, many balances are sitting in account 013109 that need to be cleared. Many people are not aware of these, or don’t have the knowledge about how to clear them, so we made instructional videos to guide people in the departments through the process of clearing the personal charges sitting in account 013109.
Other members involved in making the videos were Rebekah Martino, and Chris Zetterholm.
Description: I have created a FileMaker database that collects data from currently unrelated campus databases – ISIS, HRMS, and OCG – to track applicant, student, and student financial / appointment information. Applicant information from ISIS/Cognos is uploaded to the database and exported to a Google Drive spreadsheet for faculty to review. Student ISIS/Cognos reports, like the enrolled student and degree reports, are uploaded to track student information each semester. Additional entries are made in the student’s database record to track critical milestones, paperwork, notes, and progress. Graduate student appointments (RA, TA, and GA) are tracked and scheduled to help PPLs monitor the appointments and changes to the appointment funding sources – from OCG data.
Description: The Federal Government reimburses the campus for the significant amount of its equitable share of Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs associated with conducting organized research. Space costs represent more than 50% of the reimbursement; therefore, completing a reasonable space survey is expected by the University and the Federal Government.
Description: A team comprised of individuals from the Budget Office (Erika Smith, Dana Takeuchi, Linh-Thong Lo, Joy Vidalon, and Kristina Berg) and Accounting and Business Support (Laura Ragin, Leila McCamey, Elizabeth Spencer, Jenny Shao, and Rebekah Martino) completely overhauled the process by which internal sales (sales between university departments) are conducted on the Boulder campus. This involved in-depth analyses of three years-worth of historical financial data, issue identification, examination of current policies and procedures, research into policies and practices at peer institutions, development of new policies for the Boulder campus, communication with the campus community including senior management, and working with campus units to implement the new rules. This project has been entirely created and led by the Budget and Accounting offices and done without additional staff or operational resources.
Description: The Office of the University Controller offers Continuing Professional Education (CPE) courses to University employees as well as professionals from the local community. The courses are offered on a regular basis throughout the year. A majority of the course attendees are Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) and require these courses to maintain CPA certification. As a result, the University is required to issue certificates to each of the attendees to document completion of the course. When the courses were first offered, issuing the certificates was a manual process. Each certificate had to be hand signed by the CPE administrator.
Description: Our Residence Life department consists of 54 staff members who use the Procurement card to make about 400 purchases a month for student development programs in the Residence Halls. For fiscal year 2013, Hall Directors used an individual paper chit to capture the business purpose, comments, speedtype, and account code. Upon completion, they would physically take the chit and receipt to the Administrative Assistant, which took about five minutes of time. Next the admin would type the information into another departmental form, scan the form and receipt together, and save the pdf to the interdepartmental network, taking another 10 minutes. In cases where receipts were missing or purchase information was delayed, additional time might be needed. Finally, one more admins would upload the form to Concur and copy and paste the information into the fields in Concur, taking another five minutes per expense. Each purchase took about 20 minutes to process, or about 133 hours per month and about 500 sheets of paper.
