ACQNET v1n060 (April 10, 1991) URL = http://www.infomotions.com/serials/acqnet/acq-v1n060 ACQNET, Vol 1, No. 60, April 10, 1991 ===================================== (1) FROM: Richard Jasper SUBJECT: Accounts reconciliation (91 lines) (2) FROM: Marsha Clark SUBJECT: Accounts reconciliation (9 lines) (3) FROM: Donna Alsbury SUBJECT: Accounts reconciliation (28 lines) (4) FROM: Jim Logue SUBJECT: Accounts reconciliation (34 lines) (1) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1991 09:57 EDT From: Richard Jasper Subject: Accounting, DOBIS Fund Accounting at Emory and in DOBIS The materials budget of the Emory University General Libraries is allocated among approximately 170 funds represented in the DOBIS Acquisitions System, which we implemented at the beginning of the current fiscal year (September 1990-August 1991). These funds allow us to keep track of expenditures and encumbrance by various criteria, including subject, deposit and approval plans, recurring (serials and continuations), business and special. Although DOBIS updates encumbrances interactively, for expenditures to show up we have to run a pay invoices function, which we do weekly. The fund report generated from the pay invoices function was not sufficient to our needs, so the Libraries Systems Office and the Library Automation Unit of the Information Technology Division wrote a secondary program which provides us a fund report showing the amounts allocated, spent, and committed, along with the free and cash balances and the percentage of allocation spent and commit- ted, for each fund. The report also provides subtotals for groups of funds (setting up these groups in DOBIS was no mean task itself) and an overall total for all funds. The General Libraries, and I think this is the case with most large academic libraries, does not actually cut the check to pay for invoices. The Accounting Unit of the Acquisitions Department, which is responsible for the bookkeeping associated with the General Libaries materials budget, prepares invoices for payment, designating an appropriate University account or accounts out of which payment is to be made, then sends the prepared invoice to University Accounts Payable for processing. The General Libraries materials budget is contained within approximately 60 University accounts, known colloquially as FAS (Fund Accounting System) accounts, after the (completely separate from DOBIS) computer system employed by University Accounting. Many of the FAS accounts, especially those for endowment income, have a one-to-one correspondence to particular General Libaries funds. Many do not, however, have a one-to-one correspondence, most significantly in the case of the 1-17000 account, which contains the General Libraries annual appropriation from the University, approximately 60 percent of the overall budget; about 80 or 90 General Libraries funds hang off this one account. On a monthly basis, the Accounting Unit receives FAS ledgers from the Universi- ty Accounting Office; each ledger records expenditures transacted for each FAS account by Accounts Payable during the preceding month. The Acquisitions Accounting Unit supervisor, on a monthly basis, is responsible for reconciling the ledgers with the DOBIS fund reports. Since I did not have much experience with in-depth library fund accounting before I came to Emory two years ago, it took me a little while to grasp all this. Finally, I came up with an analogy that seems to work for me and for the non-Acquisitions folks who every quarter or so come through for an orientation: The DOBIS fund reports are like the Libraries' checkbook; the FAS ledgers are like a bank statement from the University. Every month, the Accounting Unit supervisor balances the Libraries' checkbook. The only difference is that having 170+ funds is like having 170+ checkbooks for 60 (FAS Account) bank statements. As you can imagine, the continued sanity of my Accounting Unit supervisor is a high priority for me. Reconciling the funds and the ledgers is in some ways simpler than it sounds, mainly because the Accounting Unit supervisor over the past several years has developed a set of microcomputer spreadsheets that allow her, taking the information from the weekly fund report, to keep up with where we think we are on a week to week--rather than monthly--basis. Errors in invoice processing, this way, can be spotted well in advance of the monthly ledgers. Having said this, I must confess that it is getting harder to do in DOBIS. With the acquisitions system (the oldest living automated acquisitions system, which came up in September 1965 and lasted, with relatively few changes, for 25 years) we had prior to DOBIS, we had a weekly report which listed all transac- tions; errors of omission or commission were fairly obvious. Since DOBIS we have lost that transaction log capacity and it is getting progressively harder to spot data entry errors, owing to the ever increasing amount of information we have in the system. Why do we bother to do all this? The primary reason is that the separate systems employed by University Accounting and Acquisitions Accounting make errors almost impossible to reconcile if you wait too long to notice them. The other reason is equally important: Any money we haven't spent from the general appropriation by end of the fiscal year has to be returned to the University-- and no one likes to do that! Last fiscal year we returned about $6 and some change--something like 3/10,000ths of 1 percent of the total allocated. We were able to return such a pittance because, thanks to the Accounting Unit, we kept up with encumbrances and expenditures all during the fiscal year. Also, the Accounting Unit supervisor, toward the end of the fiscal year, is preternaturally capable of knowing exactly what has and what has not been paid, what is and what is not at Accounts Payable. Ain't acquisitions grand?! Over to you, Joyce. (2) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 11:45 EST From: Marsha Clark Subject: Reconciliation of accounts At NYU, encumbrances against the materials budget are maintained internally and never reported to the university accounting office. Acquisitions reports monthly to Collection Management encumbrances and expenditures in the different subject areas. At the beginning of each fiscal year we set aside some "unre- stricted" funds to cover any problems which may arise later in the year. (3) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 08 Apr 91 20:55:16 EDT From: Donna Alsbury Subject: Reconciliation of Accounts Back in my fiscal assistant days, I attempted to reconcile acquisitions expenditure figures with the University Finance & Accounting Office expenditure figures on a monthly basis. Invoice information was manually recorded on "batch sheets" for input into the University (and later State) accounting system. Each month, the University produced a ledger and I compared listed invoices with the "batch sheet" invoices and reconciled any differences. I worked for a NOTIS library (University of Florida) and there was no reasonable method for reconciling NOTIS and F&A figures. In my current job, I've had the opportunity to design a report that might aid our libraries by providing expenditure totals for invoices created in the previous month. It is still necessary, however, to compare invoice by invoice which is an extremely labor intensive effort. I don't know how much use the libraries are making of this report, but I alway felt that it was important to attempt to keep up with the monthly reconcilia- tions since we relied on the accuracy of our internal accounts. If nothing else, it made me feel better knowing that F&A made as many mistakes as we did.) We were fortunate because all encumbrances were internal and we never had to concern ourselves with any differences in commitment figures. Most automated systems should, however, have the ability to generate reports based on commit- ments, although I realize it is easier to extract data from some systems than from others. (4) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1991 19:59 MDT From: Jim Logue Subject: Reconciliation of Accounts In response to Joyce Ogburn's question concerning account reconciliation-- The University of Utah Law Library is currently testing a procedure that will reconcile expenditures monthly, with a majority of the work taking place weekly. We also use NOTIS and are provided paper vouchers for each invoice paid on the system. These vouchers have no practical use, but we've decided to use them to catch any errors in data entry. Each voucher is stapled to each invoice - if something is left over, we have a problem to solve. This process takes place weekly. Once we receive the monthly statement of expenditures from U of U Accounting, we match our voucher/invoices to the statement entries and everything be groovy. There is a lag time from the end of the month to the time we get the statement, but it ain't a year! Theoretically, the vouchers will help us fix any errors in NOTIS before the monthly statement arrives. Committments are only as good as my estimated prices. I can get fairly close, but I generally over-guess; this covers shipping and foreign titles for which my brain refuses to acknowledge the price. We allow very little overcommitment on the computer system, so purchasing tapers off about now (our fiscal year starts in July). Because we don't overcommit much, U of U Accounting doesn't worry. If we decide the procedure above works, our accounting will go something like this: Our system will break our lump sum budget into several funds - each material type will have it's own fund and each fund will be broken down by major vendors. We'll do this to keep track of vertical and horizontal statis- tics. Vendors will have a single code throughout the several funds, so all we have to do is add up the codes and we have total vendor expenditures, as well as type. Again, this will happen every month. We'll let you know if it works! ***** END OF FILE ***** END OF FILE ***** END OF FILE ***** END OF FILE *****