Real-Time Financials Enhancements

ITS continues to partner with schools, colleges, and central offices to identify opportunities to provide real-time reporting data through the central financial system. RTF enhancements that ensure the university has rich and timely reporting data include:

• Financial Estimates
• Improved Transaction Processing
• Data Archiving

Financial Estimates

Payroll, employee benefits, and financial aid expenses represent well over 70% of the direct expenses for most university units. Offering automated, estimate calculations for these expenses in the U-M Data Warehouse and on various financial reports (e.g., Project/Grant Budget Status) provides your unit with:

• A broader level of financial information available from a single source.
• Enhanced fiscal planning and reporting without requiring duplicate data entry.

These estimates are:

• Gross Pay
• FICA (university cost only)
• Employee benefit (university cost only)
• Benefit Recharge Distribution (BRD)
• Employee parking (university cost only)
• Indirect Cost Allocation
• Financial Aid
• General Ledger estimate summary

Estimates are available for one prior fiscal year, the current fiscal year, plus two (2) future fiscal years.

Payroll Estimate Calculation Options

Based on campus feedback, flexibility has been added to the payroll estimate calculation used in various financial reports (e.g., Project/Grant Budget Status and CMB Summary of Projects). When you run financial reports containing payroll estimates (which includes Gross Pay, FICA, and BRD), you now have the option to determine the end date used in the calculation.

• The Funding End Date for each employee's appointment (default)
• The Budget Period End Date for a sponsored project/grant
• The Fiscal Year End Date for a non-sponsored project/grant or dept/dept group

Improved Transaction Processing

For financial data to be "real-time," transactions must be posted to the university's General Ledger in a timely manner throughout the month and for month-end close. Timely transaction processing ensures financial reports are more accurate, which in turn, facilitates robust financial decision making in your unit.

You can better leverage the M-Pathways system and improve your report data by examining your unit's business processes for these financial transactions.

Data Archiving

When reporting real-time financial data the volume of data stored in the M-Pathways system must be evaluated against system performance (i.e., the time it takes to run queries/reports) to ensure a quick system response.

Voucher and payment data has been maintained in FINPROD since fiscal year 1999 (July 1998–today). The current volume of this data negatively impacts system performance when querying against it for reporting purposes. To facilitate system performance going forward, ITS, Financial Operations and Procurement Services are archiving five years of voucher/payment data for FY1999–FY2003 (July 1998–June 2002).

Archiving this data allows the University to:

• More closely align to industry standards to maintain/report data for the current fiscal year plus five (5) prior years. Even with archiving, U-M will maintain two additional prior fiscal years in FINPROD.
• Reduce 34% of the data maintained in FINPROD

Voucher & Payment Data Archiving Schedule

One fiscal year at a time will be archived within the normal weekend maintenance window. A system outage is not required. The remaining schedule will be determined based on results from the FY1999 archiving process.

Criteria for Archiving include:

• The voucher's Accounting Date determines the fiscal year for the voucher.
• For PO vouchers and associated payments, the purchase order must be in Completed status.

Vouchers and associated payments for a "blanket PO" (i.e., PO that was active over several fiscal years) may not be archived.