SCT Banner YES Finance Team

Meeting Minutes

1 Meeting Logistics

Item / Description
Date / Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Time / 2:00 p.m -4:45 p.m.
Location / Kilcawley Center Room 2036

2 Attendees

Role / Name
Facilitator / Marianne Anderson
Note Taker / Marianne Anderson
Participants / Elaine Beatty
Katrena Davidson
Eileen Greaf
Jim Herschel
Rich Hideg
Akhande Khan
Jan Loychik
Tom Masters
Mary Noble
Patty Seachman
Jeff Taylor
Not Present / Bob McGovern
Tina Weintz
Fran Wolf

3 Minutes

Topic / Notes
Minutes –
1.  Discuss Banner Budget Controls being set at account level / I started the discussion giving a brief overview of budget controls in ADVANTAGE and explained that Presence Control is currently in effect for Current General and Auxiliary funds allowing them to overspend. In Banner, the control is set to the account level for ALL funds (CGF, Allocated, Auxiliary, Plant, CRF) which means a department must have money in the fund, organization and account before spending. In an Advisory Committee meeting a suggestion had been made to possibly encumber salaries and fringes, then relax the budget control to the organization level without fear of overspending in the salary and fringe accounts. The finance team is under the impression that until Human Resources goes live, the Finance module has no mechanism to release encumbrances for payroll or fringes. Finance team member, Tom Masters suggested that Project Management contact SCT to determine if a technical consultant (i.e. Pradeep or someone else) could either hold a conference call or visit on site and offer suggestions (i.e. possibly change a Banner rule class to accommodate the release of encumbrances in our Payroll interface). Eileen will discuss with Dona and Carol about contacting SCT. Eileen and Jeff both felt it would be worth investigating a solution with SCT. Another suggestion was made to encumber all other expenses (i.e. travel, check requests, etc. under a purchase order instead of the individual documents that we use now). Jeff Taylor feels that it is better institutionally to budget at the account level. He also feels if we budget at the organization level now and overspending occurs, it will be too difficult to change budgeting to the account level. Both Eileen and Jeff feel that it would be better to start at the more restrictive level at first, and relax the controls at a later date if possible. Jeff is drafting a proposal to the Executive Committee for their approval to set budgeting for all funds at the account level. In addition, the proposal will not permit overriding of account level budgeting, but instead, require a transfer.
Some items to keep in mind--Donna Wainio has informed the end users in training classes that YSU is budgeting at the account level and that they must check their budget before inputting a requisition. If the level of control is changed, she will need to know the policy has changed. Secondly, encumbrances can be viewed but cannot be completed in SSB, so if we wanted departments to encumber travels for instance they would have to use internet native Banner which would defeat the purpose of SSB. Donna has been asking individuals that have come thru training so far if encumbering funds would help their dept., but she said unfortunately the bigger depts. (Athletics, etc.) came to her training earlier before she started asking the question and she has not received a lot of feedback so far as to the departmental advantage.
2.  Implementation Meeting Update / Communications Team-Announced that the May YES newsletter should be available this Friday 5/27/05. Ron said that on the heels of the May newsletter, he would be working on the June issue. He hopes the June issue will be more technical in nature and that this information could be used as a handy guide for end users. IT WAS SUGGESTED THAT THE LAST DAY FOR BUDGET TRANSFERS BE LISTED IN THE JUNE ISSUE SO THAT END USERS KNOW TO CLEAN UP THEIR BUDGETS BEFORE UPDATE ACCESS TO ADVANTAGE IS SEVERED. The date still remains June 27th as was indicated on the FY05 Processing Deadlines document that was circulated to the university community at an earlier date. This date will be reiterated in the newsletter.
Training Team-Donna would like to have the training room open the week of July 5th so that end users could walk-in and ask Banner questions that may be troubling them. Many of the people Donna has trained thus far thought this would be a good idea. At times it is more difficult to help someone over the phone, so this would give them the opportunity for a face-to-face solution. She is unsure who will staff the training room this week, since the finance team will be working with the finance consultant on post-live consulting. Donna will give it some thought.
Technical Team-Troy is working on back-up procedures for the system. Currently Banner is backed up nightly. He also discussed the production hours of availability, which at this time will be 6:00 a.m. to midnight. Possibly the second Sunday of every month the system would be taken down to apply patches and updates. I will inform the team if any of this changes.
The finance team needs to identify printers in their office if special forms are being created on these printers, because a Jet Direct card might be needed. Eileen has Student Accounts and University Receivables info., Accounts Payable may not need to provide it (however, A/P may be printing copies of the purchase order—this will be decided in a meeting between Purchasing and A/P), and Purchasing identified the printer in their office as being P161.
Luminus Team-Announced to the team that a virtual demo was held on Tuesday, May 24th, but that I did not forward the information to them to be involved in the demo. Explained that the Luminus kick-off was still scheduled for July. Announced that Bob Tupaj has met with the graphic designers to explore designs on portal pages. He said they are leaning towards integrating the design of the YSU homepage, but the Luminus portal would still have its own look.
Carol Chen-She announced that Richard encourages us to do as much testing as possible between now and 6/13. June 17th (that weekend) plans are to clone PPRD to PROD. When Richard is here for training June 21-23 he will have a checklist to simulate daily transactions in PPRD (not TEST). After June 24th (providing the testing goes well), Purchasing can start inputting PO’s into Banner Production for FY06 and any budgets that need to be established (i.e. Plant, Grants, etc.) can be input as well. If current general and auxiliary budgets are approved and loaded into PPRD by June 17th, they can be cloned to PROD. The week of June 27th thru July 4th will be used to clean up any problems from previous week. End users availability = 7/5/05.
3.  Dropping Maintenance agreement with AMS / Rick Marsico sent an e-mail to AMS (American Management Systems) and other individuals that as of June 30, 2005 YSU will be dropping the maintenance agreement with them. He explained in the e-mail that with our perpetual license agreement we can access the software on a limited basis. He also asked AMS that should unforeseen system outage occur would AMS assist us and how much would their assistance cost? Mary Noble reported that AMS responded. If we asked for assistance in September, YSU would be responsible for paying maintenance costs for July, August, September. If we needed their assistance closer to the end of the year, YSU would be responsible for paying maintenance costs to that point. (Hopefully nothing happens).
4. Sleep/Wake processes in Banner / Distributed an e-mail from Doug Sewell identifying the sleep/wake processes that are already established in Banner. The three are, FORAPPL (approval process), FGRACTG (posting process) and FRPMESG (finance messaging system).
5. University Access to Banner / Banner will not be available for end users until Monday, July 5th. I informed the team that a suggestion was made at the IT meeting on 5/23 that a campus wide memo go out to the university community informing them of this date, since for so long we have been saying 7/1. The finance team was in unanimous agreement that this information should be distributed thru many media: the YSU Homepage, Flashing at the YSU logo, mass mailing thru News Service (besides the YES newsletter) CUE-mail and the YES newsletter. I will bring this up at the IT meeting on 6/6/05.
6. Re-establishing your Banner session after a time out / Distributed an e-mail that I received from Troy Cross about re-establishing your Banner session after a time out. Neither procedure identified on the e-mail worked for me, but everyone’s keyboard is set up differently. Also explained that Donna Wainio had this on her list of items to test, and as soon as she could identify another procedure, she would inform me and add it to her list of FAQ’s.
7. Data extract / As of 5/25/05 Troy Cross has set up the data extract option in all instances-TRNG, TEST and PPRD. He has also set the appropriate extract option (with key block, without key block) on all forms for Finance, Accounts Receivable and Advancement. I gave the team instructions on how to access the extract option and told them to test it as much as possible. Any problems they can inform me and I will forward on to Troy.
8. Touch Net and E-print implementation and training revisited / Implementation and training of Touch Net has been moved to the end of calendar year 05 or the beginning of calendar year 06 due to all that YSU needs to accomplish at this time. Rick Marsico spoke with the company and they agreed to delay the implementation with no penalty to YSU. Touch Net asked for 2 months advance notification of implementation. E-print training has also been delayed.
9. Finance members attendance at Advancement sessions / Advancement Team consultant, Andy Kearney will be on site June 14-17 (Tuesday thru Friday). ½ day on Tuesday and ½ day on Friday he plans on discussing Population Selection and Letter Generation and he recommends that several Finance and IT members attend. I announced this to the team, and we are kind of fuzzy as to what either of these processes will do for Finance. A couple of ideas were thrown out—vendor attestment letters could be generated thru Letter Generation, investigating if vendors would like to be established for direct deposit could possibly be done thru Population Selection, as well as being used for reports. I suggested that we would wait until an agenda was received to determine who, if anyone from finance should attend these sessions. It will be a difficult time for finance team members because Richard will be here at the same time working on pre-live testing, which will be more important. After receiving the agenda, individuals who can attend the Advancement session will need to be identified.
Also the week of July 26-28, Andy will be here to test the interface from Advancement to Finance. It is strongly recommended that General Accounting staff reserve these dates on their calendar and identify attendees. However, this is a crucial week for G/A since it is the week of their closing. Again, when I receive the agenda I will forward it to G/A so a decision can be made.
10. Security additions to GSASECR / Another update was forwarded to Sandy Stanhope on security access and she completed the load on 5/25/05. This part of security will continue to be a work in progress since we do not always know what tables and processes individuals should have access to. The tables/processes given to me by Katrena were included in the current load, but additional accounts receivable processes have been identified and need to be added. I asked the team to please have their staff test as much as possible to determine what security access they need. I need this information by Friday, June 3rd because Sandy would like to copy this security to PPRD.
11. Navigational Training / Donna Wainio has scheduled a navigational training for June 7th from 1:00-5:00 in the Kilcawley Training Room. She is providing this training to end users who will need to input deposit documents (remote collection sites) and journal entries (for charge backs) into Banner outside of the Finance area. I asked the team to identify any additional individuals that need to attend, but informed them that a number of individuals had already been identified from the user community.
12. Object Access Training June 2-3 / Reports will be written in MS Access against Banner Object Access Views. I suggested to the team that everyone attending needs to have some idea of an ad hoc report they would like to work on during training. However, Eileen said that Carol Chen had already identified critical reports from the list compiled by Theresa Orwell (General Accounting) and sent this list off to Kathy Kelsey. I still suggested to the team that they come to training with an idea just in case one of their reports was not on the list.
Explained that several people are involved in training of OAV/MS Access. We will need both the Kilcawley Training Room and Breshnahan. Donna and Dona will work on logistics of who will be in which room and let us know. I asked that all of the finance people be in one room whichever one it is, in case we had questions for another finance person.
13. Update on policies and procedures / Asked Jan to contact Donna Wainio regarding a procedure Materials Management would like to follow when end users need to make a correction to a requisition? Does Materials Management want an e-mail, phone call to individual buyers, phone call to one person? Jan will contact Donna.