2021-02-05 Resource Management SIG Meeting

Fiscal Year Roll Over User Acceptance Testing feedback

• Successful finishing of the testing
  • Met over a week / deemed valuable for the group who did the testing
  • Environment determined to be stable and that the data was persistent
  • Many asked for more time
    • (some did 5 rollovers) - 
  • some wanted more time in advance to share and be ready (and for planning)
  • There were no show-stopper bugs, everything was allowed to roll over a number of years
  • A number of bugs and issues have been Identified, given the following tag : acq-dev-uat 
  • Time stamping is an issue given that it is running in UTC
    • Setting to use the local time zone setting instead of a server time zone setting
    • ie: something ending today ends at 11:59:59 today
    • From the chat ("I don’t know if this is helpful but for ERM dates we work only at the Date level, not DateTime. I think Users does similar for date of birth - possibly other modules too. This avoids dealing with the time aspect ")
  • Issue at the beginning when certain finds were not rolling over when no money was allocated (fix was added for this in the middle of the bugfest)
  • Lots of helpful feedback
    • such as (there were plenty of others):
    • having a pre-screening to evaluate the rollover before actually run
    • to save rollover settings
    • Not just to deliver a report, but to walk through the decisions so the full context of the roll-over can be evaluated
    • wording and consistency through the process to be cleaned up
    • There is a way to choose encumbrances, if the re-encumbrance is not checked, then that re-encumbrance will not take effect (so, this is deemed a higher priority bug fix)
  • Next steps:
    • implement updates (fix bugs and add enhancements)
    • performance testing
    • Also, to evaluate how long the fiscal rollover will take
    • test cases will be created for this during bugfest
  • Dates and times are confusing, but Dennis wanted to know whether the new fiscal year would be started before the rollover
    • from chat (May ask us to review what the difference is between Manual and RE-encumber is? When would I ever want to check Manual? )
    • from chat (We also roll after the prev. FY has ended )
    • from chat (I think that’s normal - in my experience finance depts tend to want to commit against the year in which the goods will be received )
    • from chat (Equally payments can sometimes be made after the end of the financial year by agreement if the goods were received in the previous financial year. Its a while since I did this for real, and in different institutions there were different years )
    • Can adjust the dates if the user has the right permissions
    • Need to figure out a way to pick a previous fiscal year and roll it over even the new one has started
    • This is being looked at
    • Dennis asks of those who can join the discussion next week or through slack, to send feedback directly to him
    • Someone asks if there is a way to be 'not controlled' by time
    • need some more flexibility
    • Dennis demos to show these confusions over time and the movements of the next fiscal years (because of dates already set up that define them)
      • it was confusing that one had to select a fiscal year
      • so, just trying to figure out why these kinds of decisions are made
      • Some transactions are taking place in the accounts on the last day before the rollover
      • More coming in this (the recording and demo in the recording might be helpful to catch the nuance)
      • Clarity:
        • Will start ordering before the rollover. orders will roll over, but don't want open invoices
        • When you don't rollover until mid july, you still want to fiscal year to start july 1.
        • wait until the roll has happened and orders can be entered after the rollover
        • (Rollover and then allocate)
        • Question from the group: when would someone want to manually use to toggle
          • intended to exclude that order to be sent automatically
          • Confusion over 'manual' and 're-encumber' 
          • Currently., no auto communication is being sent to vendors
          • from chat: (My previous experience chimes with what Virigina said (but my previous experience was Aleph so maybe not surprising!) 
          • (We used to have an “acquisitions freeze” for a week or two at the FY end )
          • (But that was policy rather than system enforced )

Data Import updates: Schedule for EDIFACT, embedded MARC