Effective January 1, 2026, petty cash availability for departmental and student expenses will be replaced with the use of departmental PCards, which may be made available for student use as approved.

• Petty cash funds for human subject payments will remain available and are not affected by this change. 
• All existing petty cash funds for departmental and student expenses must be reconciled and returned to the Bursar’s Office by December 31, 2025. The Bursar’s Office will send additional communication to petty cash custodians with next steps and instructions for returning funds.
• New petty cash fund requests for departmental and student expenses will not be approved.

Additionally, the Bursar’s Office will no longer process petty cash reimbursements after December 31, 2025. For small-dollar expenses that were previously reimbursed from petty cash, please use individual or departmental PCards and reconcile the charges via an Expense Report.

While discouraged, if you must use a personal payment method for an emergency reimbursable expense, you may request reimbursement by submitting either:

• An Expense Report for an Out of Pocket cost
• A Non-Standard Disbursement (NSD) for a Non-Employee Expense Reimbursement

Helpful Resources:

Petty Cash 

PCards

Expense Reports

FY25 Year-End Memo

New Labor Distribution Dashboard for campus

What?  This is a new campus-facing Labor Distribution (LD) Dashboard for comprehensive labor distribution analysis on the following tabs:

• LD Details – This page provides comprehensive information on all Labor Distribution (LD) entries, including schedule, line details, and comments. It displays LDs across all statuses—active, inactive, new, and submitted

• LD Workflow Details – This page provides detailed workflow information, including the list of approvers and associated General Ledger (GL) strings or award/project details

• Related Reports –  This page provides links to other reports useful for Labor Distribution (LD) analysis

Why? This dashboard provides comprehensive labor distribution (LD) analysis in one place for LD analysis and reporting. Requires LD module security access.

Please join us at the upcoming Office Hour on Tuesday, October 21, from 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM to learn more about these enhancements.

Here is the zoom link info:

https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/j/97892556071?pwd=N33Iql2aNtwqdZ1mgmxorH04xK7M2k.1 Meeting ID: 978 9255 6071 Passcode: 658929

September is closed, so you may run September reports starting tomorrow.

We are pleased to announce that the temporary issue affecting purchase order (PO) numbers on the Finance Dashboard has been resolved.

As we previously noted, PO numbers for orders created after June 30, 2025, were temporarily unavailable in the Non-Labor Encumbrance Details section due to fiscal year-end processing. This work is now complete, and all PO numbers are displaying accurately.

The workaround of using the Purchasing and Payments Dashboard is no longer necessary for this purpose. We appreciate your understanding and thank you for your patience.

August is closed, so you may run August reports after 10 p.m. tonight.

The dashboards are not refreshed this morning due to a technical issue related to the most recent Oracle update, and that has caused multiple dashboard screens to be unable to populate data. The issue is actively being worked on, and the refresh process should return to normal by tomorrow.

For any purchase orders created after 6/30/25, the purchase order number is temporarily unavailable on the Finance Dashboard>Non-Labor Encumbrance Details. This change is not due to a system issue, but rather downstream impact from a time-sensitive update made on 6/30/25 for fiscal year-end processing. The purchase order number will be available again, but the Purchasing and Payments Dashboard can be used in the meantime. Thank you for your patience.

July is closed, so you may run July reports after 10 p.m. tonight.

The issue has been resolved and the dashboards have been refreshed.

Please be aware that the dashboards have not refreshed since last week as a result of an Oracle update released on July 31st. The issue has been raised with Oracle, and any updates will be provided as soon as they are received or once the issue has been resolved. Thank you.