I’ve had some follow-up questions about the relationship between the subledger and general ledger, so I would like to offer this analogy.

The general ledger is a cake.  The subledgers are sugar, flour, and eggs.  The general ledger also includes butter and vanilla (entries that happen directly in the general ledger).  Here is the graphic representation:  SL to GL cake

What brand of sugar?  What size of egg?  You can’t see an individual egg or pick out just the sugar in the cake.  You need to look at the raw ingredients.

Hope that’s helpful to someone still mastering the new-to-Rice concept of subledgers.

In today’s office hour we discussed valid and invalid combinations.  Every fund type – fund source combination you use should be backed up by something, either budget or by fund balance.  Valid combinations have budget or fund balance.  Invalid combination do not have budget or fund balance.  Corrections to invalid combinations are urgent if the correct combination is 100.000000 (A1) and important if the correct combination is a sponsored project.  Corrections can wait (if necessary) otherwise.

The same information in a grid:

These are short instructions for college or club treasurers looking at the finance dashboard Residential College and Student Club Treasurers  and a list of college and club org codes Residential College and Student Club Org Codes

We’re going to start office hours out with a scheduled, pre-set topic each week – 15 minutes on the topic, then discussion on that topic or any other question.  This is the tentative schedule for topics for the next four weeks, and then that schedule will repeat unless there are other requests.  I’m certainly open to other topics, so please send in any suggestions!

I have committed to holding office hours each week through the close of June business, then we’ll have a hiatus until after Labor Day to allow for year-end closing / writing financial statements / working with auditors.

March 16 – chart of accounts

Structure, hierarchy, theory, where to find a downloadable copy, how (and when) to request new values, how to read, the way IO uses multiple parallel charts, how subledgers are summarized

March 23 – FBDI how-to

Rice Box folder, how to fill out, which one to use, what can go wrong, what happens after you drop off, how to confirm posting

March 30 – finance dashboard

Tabs; what are they good for, difference between former Edgar reports and IO tabs, how to leverage the chart of accounts to recreate Edgar budget summary report

April 6 – other topics

Data extracts, closing (what is it, when is it, year-end)

Office hours are every Wednesday at 11, Zoom link is

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When we close a period in IO no further posting can take place.  The IO close, like Banner, has several pieces that close independently.  The pieces are P2P, Payroll, Fixed Assets, Receivables (Cashier’s Office), Projects, and General Ledger.  These were all separate before, too, although there was no Projects module in Banner.  We generally describe the period as closed when the last piece, the general ledger, is closed.  Closing the period means that the Actual YTD amount is final and no further changes will take place.

Now, there are some caveats about this.  First, the conversion from Banner to IO has involved some re-work and some delay, so every period in FY 2022 has been re-opened at some point.  I believe that the posting this weekend may (fingers crossed) be the last of that.  That would mean the Actual YTD column in the general ledger Finance Dashboard would remain static for closed periods.

Second, the encumbrances reported in the general ledger Finance Dashboard are being picked up from the open encumbrances in P2P.  This means that the encumbrance amount is not static, even if the period is closed.  As the PO balance declines, the encumbrance data is updated.

Third, the salary and fringe encumbrances are a work in progress.  The details on how these are calculated and displayed are not yet final.

The October period is now closed in IO.

I’m building a guide to items you may see on Dashboards / Finance Dashboard / Journal Detail.  The initial items are here:

Glossary of Journal Detail

I’m open to suggestions, so if you see an item on Journal Detail that you would like to see added to this list please send it my way (crystald@rice.edu)!