After closing more than 300 Fund Type (FT) 100 unrestricted operating fund projects in July and transitioning them to general ledger (GL)-only accounting, the COA2 initiative team now has completed transferring requested debit or credit balances from some of the individual FT100 projects.
As of August 21, the accounting team had closed or transferred the balances of 150 projects that had no pending employee charging instructions, or ECIs, which units use to determine the GL string or project/task to which they need to charge an employee’s payroll costs—primarily salary, fringe benefits and FICA/Med expenses. The ECIs had to be updated to GL strings before the FT100 projects could be closed.
Going forward, all FT100 transactions will be GL-only, rather than a hybrid of project/subledger accounting and GL accounting, which should make it clearer for units to understand their true balances in the FT100 funds.
In addition to the balance transfers, the COA2 team also completed a data collection request, receiving payroll costing department default GL codes and some HR department hierarchy updates from all units across the university.
“There were no surprises,” says Mike Zeto, project manager for COA2. “The units provided the data requested without any issues.”
Come Fall, the COA2 project team will move toward the fiscal year 2025 closing of all FT150 unrestricted operating funds projects. As part of the preparation for that work, the team will develop communications to keep stakeholders within the university community apprised.
If you have any questions about this update, please contact the project team at coa_phase_2@finance.rutgers.edu.