The Chart of Accounts (COA) Phase 2 project team hit a particularly busy stretch in mid-January. Efforts to close fund type 150 (FT150) projects—a segment of the university’s chart of accounts that represent operating funds designated for use by administrative units—began wrapping up, and the team started work to update departments’ unit-division-organization-location (UDOL) combination to facilitate more accurate financial reporting.
On January 14, the COA2 team shared with business managers in all central and Chancellor-led units how the initiative will align with the updated department structure that the university will adopt as part of the changes associated with phase 1 of the HR/Payroll Transformation Initiative.
Currently, many departments share the same default unit-division-organization (UDO) in the HR structure. The updated HR structure will instead assign each department a unique default unit-division-organization-location (UDOL) combination to facilitate more granular alignment with financial reporting.
To ease the transition to the updated UDOL values, the COA2 project team is working to confirm the most efficient approach for requesting desired updates to systems that integrate with the financial system. For example, the team will provide guidance on how to request updates for processing in procurement, project accounting, student accounting, etc., and in late March it will distribute instructions with due dates.
The UDOL alignment will be completed by July 1.
FT150 closings progress
The COA2 initiative also completed four additional tasks critical to the closing of the FT150 projects:
- Changing employee charging instructions (ECIs) from project strings to general ledger (GL) strings with new Activity segment values.
- Approving approval of Concur Travel and Expense transactions that include FT150 project strings
- Finalizing project purchase order (PO) closings and process of related invoices
- Modification or reclassification of multi-year FT150 project POs
Currently, the University Controller’s Office (UCO) is in the process of closing all FT150 projects that have a zero balance and no commitments. Units are advised to no longer make any project cost or revenue journals for FT150 projects.
The UCO was set to complete the closing of all remaining FT150 projects following the February field close on March 14, with balance transfers to be completed by March 31.
If you have any questions about this update or the COA2 project, please contact the project team at coa_phase_2@finance.rutgers.edu.