Thanks for the replies. I feel better about doing it. The library business
office has not been particularly supportive of my work to reconcile the two
systems. I do it for all the reasons shared and have encountered the same
problems.
Problems:
Credit card purchases not in one system or the other
Credit card purchases charged to different funds on each system (endowments
versus general funds)
“Rare” mistakes by invoice keyers in the Library or in disbursements
Cancelled check refunds that need to be re-issued!!
Wire transfers not paid out by campus
Inter-campus fund transfers, not registered in one system or the other
Benefits:
More accurate available balances for selectors to see in the ILS
Less to clean up at the end of the fiscal year
I can be confident that the amount of funds left (available for big ticket
items late in the year) is correct
In the past someone would spend a huge amount of time in May and June
trying to figure out what the discrepancies were between campus and
Millennium and then get them fixed. Balance discrepancies can be in initial
allocation (particularly for endowments and donations), carryforward (which
we get), transfers, or expenses/credits. So when looking for a cash balance
difference, we’d need to check each of those.
The past three years we’ve spent about $20M on collections. We have about
270 funds, three or four are general, several are contracts or grants, the
rest endowments and gifts. We also have serials and one-time expense
department ids and multiple expense accounts using the campus chart string
system. That leads to about 700 funds in Millennium. Years ago Library IT
scripted a program to format and transmit to campus each week’s payments.
We post payments only once a week. However, we can’t receive data back from
campus.
For the past three fiscal years, I’ve been gathering the “postout” data
weekly and building an invoice line item payment file with PO, vendor,
invoice number, account code, fund code, dept id, library fund code,
amount, shipping, total paid, and more. Every week, two days after posting
payments to campus, we gather all campus financial transactions made on
collection dept ids. For the past two years, I’ve been using a collection
of queries to reconcile most of these transactions between the systems with
a few clicks. Wire transfers, credit cards, and reimbursements take a
little more effort. I’ve added queries to find credits for cancelled checks
when we’ve already reconciled the payment in the same fiscal year.
Glad I’m not alone in thinking this is important work.
Mark Hemhauser
Head of Acquisitions, The Library
250 Moffitt Library, MC 6000
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000
510-664-4310
*From:* Mark Hemhauser [mailto:mhemhauser_at_berkeley.edu]
*Sent:* Wednesday, July 18, 2018 5:22 PM
*To:* acqnet_at_lists.ala.org
*Subject:* reconciling ILS payments to campus payments
I sent this a few weeks ago, but looking at it again, it seems I used an
old acqnet email address, so trying again.
Do people still try to balance their payments in the ILS with the payments
in the campus system?
Do you try to reconcile and balance your overall spending and income by
fund between the two systems?
When I started in serials in 1994 we would monthly compare a campus
payments sheet, printed out, to the ILS payments (also printed) to confirm
campus paid the invoice and the amount correctly. Later we used the campus
print out to record the voucher number and payment date in the Voyager
invoice record. Some places have moved to automated processes where the ILS
transmits data to campus and campus passes voucher numbers back. That is
more or less automatically reconciled. The dollar amounts shouldn’t go
wrong, they aren’t being rekeyed. But if you don’t have that back and forth
communication between systems, do you do anything to reconcile?
Thanks for thoughts or practices.
Mark
Mark Hemhauser
Head of Acquisitions, The Library
250 Moffitt Library, MC 6000
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000
510-664-4310
Received on Thu Jul 19 2018 - 21:55:52 EDT