Recharges

This module allows the entry, processing and tracking of departmental recharges. It generates reports including printed and electronic Financial Journals which are sent to Accounting and backup documentation which can be sent to PIs and to other departments. It also will post the credits and debits associated with recharge activity to the Budget component of your departmental instance of GUS.

Recharge activities may be edited (amounts, funding sources) and moved between different financial journals until posted to the GUS Budget component. After that time, only a user with Recharge Administrator privileges can make changes. Any changes at this time should be made with great care, as they can cause mismatches between financial data within GUS and the equivalent data on the campus GLO.

Simplified Process Outline

  1. Dept. A provides goods or services that other departments want and that are based upon a recharge rate which has been approved by the Office of Budget & Planning
  • these are entered into GUS as recharge activities
  • recharge activities are associated with a receiving account/fund, project, sub, cost type (cost type is utilized if recharge is internal to your department, blank if recharging an external department) and object code that are already setup and managed by Dept. A (in GUS).
  1. Dept. B consumes the goods/services performed by Dept.A
  • Dept. A enters Dept.B as an “External Department” in GUS
  • Dept. A enters the recharge in one of three ways
    1. Recharge-> Enter Recharges
    2. Recharge-> Bulk Recharge Entry
    3. Recharge-> Import Storeroom recharges
  1. Recharges are set to a journal, (that has a journal date) and the journal recharges are posted to budget.

General Overview of Use

Initial setup

  • Setting preferences for your department
  • Defining acceptable recharge activities
  • External departments and accounts must be set up to be recharged
  • Recharge activities are created and associated with an account/fund, project, sub, cost type (if internal to department) and object code that will receive the funds for the recharge activity

Typical Workflow

  1. Enter new recharges
  2. Edit the new recharges
    1. Review and modify the individual recharges
    2. Associate the recharges with a Financial Journal
    3. Review the funding sources associated with the recharges
    4. As a best practice, we recommend that you copy to Excel any recharges to external departments and provide to them so they have a chance to review/correct account-funds prior to submittal of the Financial Journal.
  3. Print the Financial Journal (or save to PDF)
  4. Review the printed Financial Journal
    1. If corrections are needed, return to step 2
    2. If everything is OK, continue to step 5
  5. Generate the electronic version of the Financial Journal which can be sent to Accounting. After upload and confirmation from Accounting that there were no edit issues, a hard-copy must be provided. Accounting requests that hard copy journals include text: “DO NOT DATA ENTER - FILE SENT TO ACCOUNTING COMPUTER SUPPORT” along with text indicating the file name of the uploaded file, the department, and name of submitter.
  6. Post the Recharges to the Budget Module
  7. Print Backup Documentation (hard copy or electronically) which can be distributed to PIs and other departments as needed.

Associated Documents

The recharge process produces three artifacts along the way:

  1. Financial Journal - Provided to Accounting. Note that this report includes information not normally contained in traditional financial journals. New information includes Project Codes, Cost Types and additional PI information in the Account Names. This information will appear in the GLO’s and will be used by future versions of GUS to help deal with automatic reconciliation.

    If the Financial Journal is sent to Accounting only in paper format the additional data will require more hand-entry work at Accounting. For this reason electronic submission of the Financial Journal is recommended. This will reduce their labor as well as reduce the chance of typographic errors.

  2. Project Statement - Typically provided to PIs within our own department. This report may be included as backup documentation with monthly financial statements, or sent out at the time of recharge. Each recharge statement is subtotaled by Cost Type.

  3. Other Department Statement - Typically provided to other departments. One statement is printed for each separate funding source or Project as defined by the receiving department. These may be provided hard-copy or emailed.

Recharge FAQs

How to upload a Financial Journal to the Accounting ftp site from windows

Open a Command Window

from Start -> Run -> Where is says Open: type:

cmd

and hit return.

This should open a Command Window

Go to directory/folder where you wrote the Financial Journal

Let’s say your file is named c:GUSstuffFinJo123

need to first go to drive C by typing:

C:

Now your prompt should look like:

C:\>

then change directories to GUSstuff:

C:\> cd GUS\stuff

Now your prompt should look like:

C:\GUS\stuff>

to see what files are in this folder type:

dir

You should see your financial Journal file there. If not check to see where you put the file and and use the cd command to get there.

begin ftp

From your Command Prompt window type:

ftp ccnh.ucsb.edu

and hit return.

This will then ask for your Accounting username and password. Type these in and hit return (remember these are case sensitive)

Now your prompt should look something like:

ftp>

Now you need to change directories to the place where you will upload your financial journal by typing:

cd 'am1p.gl.ld'

Note

don’t forget the single quotes

should get a message back saying “AM1P.GL.LD” is the working directory.

Warning

This command is critical for getting your file to Accounting in the proper form

type:

LITERAL SITE RECFM=FB LRECL=368 BLKSIZE=27968

This will literally send the ‘site’ command with the above values. Not all ftp clients understand the ‘site’ command. The ‘literal’ command is a way to get this specific command to the Accounting ftp server.

Now to upload your Financial Journal file, FinJo123, to accounting type:

put FinJo123

Should get a message back saying you were successfull.

You can now quit ftp by typing:

quit.

Recharge Screens

Recharge Activity

recharge-activities

Entering Recharges

New Recharges can be entered in three different ways:

  1. Manually, via the Enter Recharges screen:

    new-recharge

  2. Copy/paste from excel into the bulk-recharge screen:

    bulk-recharge

  3. Import from a file that has been created by a recharge service

Who gets Charged

Recharging Dept. enters external Projects under External Department & Accounts in GUS: it is important to verify the account/fund with external departments. This is to ensure that the info is correct and the recharge will process when sent to Accounting. It also helps to have a contact person, the project name that users will provide so it matches, as well as end date of funding)

external-dept

Editing Recharges

After entering recharges, they may need to be edited, which is done via the Edit Recharges screen:

edit-recharge

To edit a recharge, double click on it and make changes in the pop-up window:

edit-recharge-one

Associating Recharges to a financial journal

Edited recharges should then be added to a journal. This is done by searching for recharges that have not been added to a journal (Financial Journal = “Not Set”). If further refinement in the selection is required, you can narrow the query-set by entering other search criteria.

set-journal

When only the recharges that should be associated with a particular journal are displayed, click “Set Journal” and affirm the journal date.

setting-journal

If you do not have a journal to associate recharges with, one must be created. This can be done by selecting ‘Recharges’ from the main menu and then ‘financial journals’. In the window that opens, choose ‘new’.

financial-journals

Review funding sources

Before printing a journal (or sending it to Accounting), it is important to review your own information. GUS will select the recharges that are to external departments or are on open project with funding available. For internal projects that will result in overdrafts, an error message will display. Review and correct these, as necessary. Once you have accepted the appropriate projects, you can set the journal.

credit-recharge

Post the recharges

Once Accounting verifies the upload was error free, it is time to post the journal. After selecting the journal from the recharges screen, choose the ‘Post Recharges’ button to post the recharges to the budget section of GUS.

recharge_post

Send the ‘backup’

report