2020-08-20 Resource Management Meeting Notes

Julie Brannon (old account)

Kristin Martin

Dennis shared a demo of Shared Allocations and Expense Classes and User Acceptance Testing opportunity.

Call for Testers

• See the RM SIG Slack channel for details about joining this effort
• Looking for testing of this feature as soon as possible to address issues quickly prior to bug fest
• Thunderjet environment is for the development team and designed for early testing by dev team and other participants
• Expense classes add a layer to the fund to enable tracking of expenditures with more granularity.
• Creating Expense Classes:  In Settings/Finance/Expense Classes you can see the list of expense classes.  Dennis will use Electronic and Print for this demo.  External account number is intended to capture what identifies where the money comes from as tracked in your university accounting system.  The expense class adds info to the external account number in the form of an extension.  This is an optional field.
•  Steps
  • Begin by creating a ledger for your group
  • Create a handful of funds
  • Create a budget for the current fiscal year
  • Allocate some money for the current fiscal year
  • Add expense class to budget and indicate Active status
  • Can add the expense classes to m

Virginia - summarized understanding of use case for expense class

Sara - I might want my subscriptions to be x amount and print to be y - can we choose something other than %?  Dennis:  At the moment we're not setting restrictions for the amounts - there is another feature for that.  This base functionality tracks, but doesn't control

Virginia: What is the advantage of allocating with a large bucket and then allocating percentages by expense class?  Ann Crowley - it allows you to analyze what you've spent on each expense class within an entire group - so you can see all electronic spending across a group of funds.

Kristin: Depreciation - they have a separate database to track break downs better.  Capital expenses are tracked, for examples.  Approvals go on a different fund - this might allow all of those to go into one fund.

Sara reminded us that Michael Arthur wanted this feature, so he might be able to speak to advantages.  Per Ann Crowley, it would be the equivalent of an expense class in Voyager.

Expense classes will allow you to track for reporting purposes

Martina S - You might have a subject fund and have two budgets - one for monographs one for serials.  At the end of the year you might find yourself needing to transfer money if you overspend in one.  With this expense class design you can avoid

Julie B How soon will the ability to restrict spending based on expense class be ready? Dennis: UXPROD-2409 - Getting issue details... STATUS - priority ranking is very low now so its not a Q4 feature which is as far as they've been ranked.  Martina would like this between one quarter after go live and one year after go live, but that isn't a ranking option.

Sara:  How do I see the summary of spending across a group?  Open the group and it will appear as a new accordion below the list of funds that are associated with that group.

Dennis:  There is currently no summary at the ledger level for expense class - it's possible, but wasn't originally identified as important.  Feel free to add that feedback during testing.