Financials - Coming July 1, 2008

General Ledger

The General Ledger (GL) module is a financial and accounting management tool that supports and automates complex business processes. Backed by a set of powerful productivity and reporting tools, the benefits of the general ledger system include:

• Simplified queries against the database employing drill down features that allow a user to spend only a few minutes to locate transactional data.
• Improved financial reporting tools and tree management system (hierarchical structuring)
• Automated uploading of spreadsheet journal entries into the general ledger.
  

Accounts Payable

Accounts Payable (AP) combines efficient invoice and payment processing and access to detailed vendor information. Benefits and featured functionality of AP include:

• Improves visibility to invoice status.
• Ability to link purchase orders and receipts to invoices.
• Reduces invoice entry time to create large invoices by electronically copying purchase order data directly into an invoice transaction.
• Improved vendor management system which eliminates the need to create duplicate vendors simply due to multiple addresses; improved vendor classification and tracking features and there is no ability to create duplicate vendors.
• Will improve accuracy on vendor payments – enhance vendor address management, no ability to create duplicate invoice payments for a vendor.
• Allows for uploading spreadsheet invoice entries
  

Purchasing

The Purchasing module enables the efficient online management of requisitions, vendor contracts, purchase orders, and receivers. It also supports the automatic faxing of purchase orders. Key benefit:

• Automated requisition approvals and requisition routing to MMD.
• Access for tracking requisitions, purchase orders, receiving and payments.
  

Budgets & Commitment Control

The Budgets and Commitment Control module automates budget administration, shortens the budget preparation cycle, and offers a powerful budgeting solution by combining spreadsheets, workflow processing, and PeopleSoft reporting and query tools. This module will allow users to:

• Compile and distribute budget and forecast data.
• Perform forecasting activities.
• Perform ad hoc analysis .
• Focus on year-over-year comparisons and variance analysis.
• Set up their own strategic plan at a department level.
  

Asset Management

The Asset Management module revolutionizes the management of financial and operational asset and physical property information and integrates it with other critical financial and operations systems. Benefits include:

• Flexible depreciation - Set up and maintain an unlimited number of depreciation methods for each asset.
• Store extensive physical asset information to maintain tight control over your assets throughout their life cycle.
• Adjustment, and transfer functionality - Simplify asset entry and adjustment tasks with automated functionality and intuitive data entry pages.
• Capital acquisition planning. Plan, budget, and track capital acquisitions. Establish capital appropriation plans, including a master plan, and manage them to asset acquisitions.
  

Grants

This module provides a full life cycle-sponsored research solution. Components include pre-award, post-award, award management, and a comprehensive reporting solution. Currently this function is handled manually. Benefits include:

• Allows for centralized pre-award and post-award information that will improve the consistency of research information by eliminating multiple points of data entry.
• Allows users to create and modify grant proposals and request continuations.
• Transfers accepted proposals into awards.
• Ability to distinguish between sponsor-awarded and cost-shared transactions.
  

Receivables

Provides grant receivables management staff with the customer information they need to efficiently process receivable and payment information, maintain open items, and determine corporate credit relationships. Currently this function is handled manually at Howard University. Benefits include:

• Automated collection of payment information.
• Automated journal generation to the general ledger.
• Automated aging reports based on criteria set by the grants managers.
• Automated generation of dunning letters.