Reporting cluster review is upcoming - May 8th (next meeting). See Slack channel for list
Item State conversations: PO Emma B will join one of RM SIGs meetings sometime in May to discuss behaviors in relation to acquisitions/receiving. For example, should the item status be allowed to be changed back to 'on order' after receipt. Should that happen through the acq apps (with the permissions associated with them).
Kristin and Dennis met to reorder topics for today's session - will start with financial topics
Q2 feature - attempting to address the issue that if you create an invoice and there are no orders associated with that invoice, your funds won't be encumbered. When the invoice is paid the money will be pulled from the fund, but there is a "crack" in the processes since it isn't showing encumbrance.
Example walked through by Dennis:
Created an invoice line for shipping costs to make sure that the invoice line doesn't related to a purchase order linewhich guarantees that there is no encumbrance. When you approve the invoice, FOLIO moves the values to "awaiting payment."
The problem is, there was no encumbrance for the line we created. If it doesn't relate to an order that has an encumbrance, that amount isn't committed as an encumbrance.
How to resolve? Options:
Option 1: We could create a new type of transaction 'pending payment'.
The source would always be an invoice - instead of creating an encumbrance. When you look at a budget, this amount would get included in the "Awaiting payment" bucket.
It would behave the same as an encumbrance, except that there would never have been
Option 2: We could change the "encumbrance" transaction type to "Commitment". When we open an order, we would be making a "commitment." When we approve an invoice, line, that could also commit funds.
This would allow us to see, on the transaction list, a clearer more simplified list
If the source of the commitment is "invoice", then that will be a clue that this transaction was never encumbered
Question from Virginia Martin: For ongoing orders that you don't encumber them year to year - would that get lost? Exactly the same scenario - it's important to be able to clearly see what's encumbered vs. an invoice awaiting payment. How will we be able to report on those -
Dennis - yes, we need to make sure we have a transaction for these and what do we call it? You'll see it at the budget level, and at the order level, we have the awaiting payment value, we're just missing when there is no encumbrance initially. Small group though "encumbrance" is misleading for these since it was never encumbered. We could make an "awaiting payment" transaction (option 1), but what do we do with that? There would be a payment transaction, but the awaiting payment would go down to zero.
