2021-01-15 Resource Management SIG Meeting Notes

Date

Attendees

Discussion items

Minute takerAbigail Wickes

Announcements/Updates

  • New documentation technical writers on the call, welcome! 
  • Highlights from PC minutes–MARCCat development has halted due to some development conflicts; instead Metadata SIG is recommending expansion of QuickMARC with guidance from Khalilah
  • Metadata Management work on productivity stats–would welcome RM related feedback
  • Sharon Beltane would like institutions to review report clusters–link in JIRA
  • Revisiting Iris timeline–back to first release date (May 3) as per Capacity Planning team
    • Still planning on 3 releases in 2021; Juniper planned for August (should be mostly bug fixes w/ a few new features,) followed by Kiwi in mid-November
  • Discussion of moving SMEs into feedback loop (e.g. Dennis as an early-adopter able to do testing in scratch environment) to get feedback earlier than bugfest
    • UAT testing hopefully starting next week, as per Dennis; more to come in demo; Julie Brannon would like to participate

Fiscal Year Roll Over Demo

  • Demo focusing on UAT set-up, but early in release/testing environment so there are some lingering issues pre-completion
  • Plan to start testing Thurs. of next week (due to US MLK holiday on Mon., US Presidential Inauguration on Wed.)

Set Up:

  • Start by assigning permissions; users need "Finance: Execute fiscal year rollover"
  • Testing asks you to set up three "fiscal years" (with short periods for testing, like a few days)
  • Create a ledger, and assign to first test fiscal year
  • Did not create any groups–they are optional, but could be interesting to test locally if you plan to use them
  • Created three Funds (A, B, C) and allocated funds to them in current test fiscal year; added higher allowable expenditure and encumbrance to budget
  • Created some transfer activity on Ledger, encumbered at least one order (recommend encumbering 4-5, pay a few invoices for testing, but not too much so you can see what you've done more easily and see what it looks like on rollover; recommend testing at least one order of each type)

Demo:

  • To start rollover, go back to Ledger; system is tracking current fiscal year based on today's date; if there's some overlap, system will look for next upcoming start date closest to today's date
  • Actions>>Rollover
  • System shows current fiscal year with period begin and end date; you can then choose Fiscal Year (want to refine so it only shows future fiscal years, rather than all of them.) You can also create a new Fiscal Year from the Rollover configuration screen
  • "Do not restrict encumbrances" and "Do not restrict expenditures" checkboxes are there so encumbering/spending can continue before money is allocated to budgets if needed
  • "Close all current budgets" checkbox to prevent spending and encumbering on all budgets during rollover
  • Question from Sara C: institution didn't know what budgets would be in July, no allocations, but needed to pay things–confirming "Do not restrict..." checkboxes would need to be selected until budget was available?
  • Answer from Dennis: normally you want a restriction; checkboxes are handled at ledger record level regardless of budget settings; so you can turn it off at the ledger level when needed. Other possibility, in actual Budget you have allowable expenditure and allowable encumbrance that can be set to blank, to indicate no restrictions; you can also set those values in Rollover budgets section of Rollover configuration
    • Don't forget that blank or empty counts as a value

Rollover budgets

  • "Rollover allocation"–specific amount available in budget; "Rollover available"–whatever actual dollar amount is in that fund; can be treated as a transfer or part of the allocation
  • Currently no toggle in "Allowed encumbrance %", "Allowed expenditure %" to let user decide whether they want to select values or not–plan to have "Yes/No" in the future so user is not forced to choose some value (blank for no restrictions, 0% for completely restricted) defaults to setting from previous fiscal year
      • Question from Virginia M: does default from previous fiscal year default to the value set at the start of the fiscal year, or value by the end of the fiscal year? Is there a default setting we could use in the header to keep from having to set each Fund type back to needed value?
      • Answer from Dennis: defaults to whatever is currently set; could probably create header set up
      • Question from Sarah C: Does selecting "Do not restrict..." checkboxes override Rollover budgets settings until they are unchecked?
      • Answer from Dennis: Yes

Rollover encumbrances

  • Separates orders into three categories that all have Rollover checkboxes which activate fields for input when selected
    • Ongoing encumbrances (not subscriptions)
    • Ongoing subscription-encumbrances (toggle in Ongoing Orders where you can indicate subscriptions)
    • One-time encumbrances
  • Decide whether each Order type encumbrance is "Based on": "Expended" or "Remaining"; can also add % inflation
      • Question from Virginia M: for subscriptions, if something has been paid and there's no longer encumbrance, would like it to be rolled over based on previous year's paid amount; if it wasn't paid in previous FY, would be nice to just rollover remaining amount (e.g. if the invoice is late). Is that possible? (Maybe optional for institutions that wouldn't want that functionality)
        • Answer from Dennis: Likely possible, since system would know whether invoices were processed; could be a default or setting
        • Kristin M and Sara C: don't use encumbrances for open orders
      • Question from Sara C: "Remaining" and "Expended" don't make sense in this case; example of monograph for $30 that hasn't arrived–not expended or remaining, just open
        • Answer from Dennis: if you haven't paid anything yet, could use Remaining; had talked about including "Initially encumbered" example in case price changes one year but want to encumber expected amount when rolling over for next year; could see some other use cases for one-time orders
      • Question from Kristin M: if you do a multi-line purchase order are there a lot of circumstances where you get part of it?
        • Answer from Lisa Maybury: happens at Cornell
  • After rollover you can no longer see settings, so take a screenshot during testing (looking into viewing settings after rollover)
  • After settings are in place, click Rollover; should see a message confirming successful rollover; can then pull error report (.csv) to show details (more info on error report in Wiki)
      • Question from Lloyd C in chat: could we get an "are you sure?" button? w/ +1 from Sara C; or review screen before rolling over?
        • Answer from Dennis: confirmation button coming, just not in place yet
  • If no errors, go back to Ledger; still shows current fiscal year since it is determined by current date/fiscal year period. However, all budgets are closed, even though you still see current fiscal year
    • Can change FY date to end yesterday and change current FY start date to today to see change in "Current fiscal year" for testing
  • Testing for Google Form: UAT Fiscal Year Rollover 1 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe_A2IDPmNoZm2YcMeIApEqupcwLonWoV6wHyW3z05_QUQW8Q/viewform
    • Expecting one test per institution
    • More info coming on Slack when UAT testing is ready to start on Thurs.

AOB

  • Question from Virginia M: could we get a document started for running questions for RM, similar to ERM? +1 Sara C–table format is helpful for keeping track of what has already been addressed
    • Answer from Kristin M: could get that started, bring up any linger items from Parking Lot
  • Question from Virginia M: When adding new contact to Organizations, how do you delete old contact from list that pops up, not just from Contacts interface? Also not clear how to edit?
    • Answer from Natalya P: information isn't currently deleted from FOLIO, even if it disappears from interface
    • Answer from Sara C: can only edit/delete from individual contact screen, not from list;
    • Unclear if contact is unassigned if contact record can be edited or deleted
  • Question from Kristin M: what happens when a contact moves from one Organization to another? Do you need to create a second version?
    • Perhaps they can be reassigned, but then all vendor info would need to be changed
  • Sara C: advocating for consistency in set up for items in Inventory–right now filtering is really different between physical and e-resources

Action items

  • Kristin Martin will create running question document for RM in table format similar to ERM, add any lingering items from Parking Lot