My Financial Desktop . . . At Your Desktop

by Erick Winger

The future looks bright for those employees on campus who manage and use financial information, so the time has come to buy some “shades.” The USER project (University Services Renewal) has been working on an exciting new project with department personnel and key members of Financial Management. They are creating a new financial tool My Financial Desktop that makes managing financial information easier than ever before. This new tool is an online system that will enable users to create and view various financial reports directly from their PC desktops.

The USER group plans to introduce the first elements of the Financial Desktop in three stages.

The first stage will introduce the Reporting Application, which is currently well along in its development and design. This Reporting Application includes the following reports that you will be able to view directly from your PC:

• Budget List: The Budget List report compiles a group of budgets and places them in an easy to read list. The columns will display such information as Budget Balance, Transaction Totals, and Encumbrance Totals, which will make it easy to manage any group of budgets at a high level.

• Budget Summary: The Budget Summary is an online version of the Budget Status Report (BSR), and so much more. This report summarizes budgetary information such as transaction totals, encumbrance totals, and balances for a single budget. This information is subtotaled at the object code and sub-object code level. It can be viewed on an accounting month basis (such as can be seen in the BSR) or for other reporting periods such as fiscal quarters, fiscal years, biennium, and more. Another added benefit of this report is that the information is updated daily.

• Transactions Summary: The Transactions Summary application compiles transactions within a selected reporting period for a budget. These transactions are organized by object and sub-object code. There are several reporting periods available to view. The monthly reporting period will serve as an online Budget Activity Report (BAR).

• Queries: The Queries page is a search function that will allow the user to search all financial transactions based on selected criteria. These searches can output results in several formats, including Excel, making it simple to manipulate the data as necessary.

The second stage will introduce the Internal Transactions Application. The Internal Transactions Application will allow users to prepare and submit, online, expense-related journal vouchers, cost transfer invoices (CTI), internal sales documents (ISD), and cash transmittals (CT). Not only will this be more convenient to the users, it will eliminate a lot of paper transactions and result in more timely and accurate accounting.

The third stage of the Financial Desktop will introduce the Project Cost Accounting (PCA) tool. This tool will make it easy for users of financial data to account for transactions by project. This is a tool currently available to campus, but as part of the Desktop, it will be much easier to use than before.

Thanks to the USER Project, members of the Project Task Groups and other consulting members of Financial Management (such as the Financial Accounting Audit Team), My Financial Desktop will soon be a part of the UW financial world. Indeed, the future is bright!

You can read more here about the Financial Desktop Initiative and all the many members of Financial Management who are contributing to it.