Research and Cost Accounting Blog

Many of you have reached out to RCA with questions about what COA information you should enter when charging expenses to a project.  We discussed it with the experts, and we have an easy answer for you: the COA information is there as a pass-through only, so you don’t need to worry about it.

While the current Procurement: Order by Quantity or Amount job aid does indicate that a COA string is required to be entered for every purchase, including project-funded purchases, it fails to mention that the COA information will be overridden by any POETAF information entered.  P2P will work on getting the job aid updated to explain this aspect of the process.

So if you enter POET information for your purchases and a COA pops up, please leave it with whatever information defaults in there.  If you edit the COA information for any reason afterwards, it will override the POET information and your charge will not post to PPM.

For those who missed it, last week the Budget Office sent out the following information  about how to process balance transfers in the new system:

There is now a new interim transfer process for handling fund balance transfers, formerly called budget transfers.  This process entails completing an AdobeSign form that is routed for workflow approvals (see attached job aid) and posts in iO.  This process is for temporary (operating year) balance transfers between fund types or between departments.  You will need to contact the Budget Office for base (permanent) budget adjustments as they will not be processed using this interim process.

Important things to note:

• All transfers will be processed as Year-to-Date entries in iO, using the Transfers – Inter/Intra Departmental account code (6800).
• Because of the end-of-year carryover process for the Unrestricted General Operating fund (000000) and because unspent fringe benefits budgets do not carryover, the Budget Office will need to capture fund balance transfers associated with salary and fringe benefits accounts (including Faculty Academic Year Time transfers).
• To capture the fringe benefits, the Adobe Sign form will contain a drop-down list of valid accounts (including faculty, staff, student, and fringe accounts) that will be written to a database file for use during the year-end analysis of carryover funds.
• Use of Salary and Fringe accounts is only permitted on the Unrestricted General Operating fund (000000).
• Faculty Academic Year Time transfers will require a separate action by the Project Administrators to update the PPM faculty/task budgets of any faculty receiving AYT funds.
• Faculty fund transfers will be a two-step process.  First, there will need to be a transfer to the receiving department’s designated fund with the appropriate fund source code (Faculty Discretionary – 010000, Faculty Start-up – 010010, Faculty Non-Sponsored Research Funds – 010020, or Faculty Retention – 010030).  Second, a separate action by the Project Administrators will need to be performed to update the PPM faculty/task budgets for the faculty receiving the additional funds.

Job Aid:  AdobeSign iO Balance Transfer