Finances - Funds & Transactions - UX Iterations 5

A brief Funds and Transactions overview in the latest version of FInances

One small question: what does “Awaiting Payment” mean? Is this when an invoice has been entered but not approved?

What Fund metadata fields are intended to be used to point to external university budget codes/other financial information? Is that what the “Code” field is for? Perhaps “External Budget” or something would be more clear? We also make heavy use of a controlled field of Fund “Type” that I don’t see anywhere on here. I appreciate that Tags will provide some handy ways to label and report on funds (and other record types throughout the system, but I’m wary of relying on them for some values that really need more control.

One more question - how will Funds be named? Will there be a required number of alphanumerics, each with its own meaning? Or is it going to be more up the individual library? We encode a lot of information in our fund codes currently, for example: PXXUXXXIDXXX612.

The “P” means Perkins (as opposed to Ford or Medical, other libraries using the same system), so I supposed that the Ledger would do away with needing that first letter. the XX is additional available space for that information. The U means the funds are university allocated, as opposed to a specific endowment, each of which has its own series of letters. The ID stands for “Interdisciplinary” and is the subject area of the fund. The 61 refers to external budget numbers which begin with 61 (not sure what the 6 means but the 1 means ongoing), and the 2 is for library use to identify resource type, in this case journals (as opposed to databases or newspapers).

I think there are lots of other ways to build this information into the record of the Fund without putting it all into the Fund name, but when you have hundreds of Funds, as we do at Duke, you start to run out of short ways to refer to Funds without encoding it, otherwise you end up with something like “Perkins University Allocated Middle East Newspaper Subscriptions Fund” and that’s a mouthful.

A couple of questions:

1. Is there a plan for the ability to import allocations from a spreadsheet or something similar? It’s a feature in OLE I’ve found very helpful–create a spreadsheet with all of the allocations for the year and import it into OLE. I’m often using spreadsheets to work through the various allocations as well. That said, I think there might be some functionality within FOLIO that could support some of this work.

2. Is it possible to set a default over/under encumbrance broadly? I don’t want to inadvertently spend 75% of an allocation in the first three months of the fiscal year, for example. Does setting this number result in a hard stop to creating a po or paying an invoice or a warning that can be overridden?

3. There seem to be explicit permissions regarding which funds can transfer to which funds. How does it behave if leave “Allow allocation from” and “Allow allocation to” spaces blank? Will it allow me to transfer to and from any fund, or does that mean I can’t transfer to anything? I prefer the former.

4. I think the general structure will work–especially with the tags. I think the tags in pos and funds could possibly do a lot of the work to support some reporting needs.

5. Where does the external/university account number reside?