Potential erroneous budget data for July 2010 (1A and 1B funds only)

Dear Budget Module user,

We’d like to alert you to a problem we’ve encountered with the July (period 03) Finance data warehouse views. If you create your own Crystal Report templates, have requested templates tailor made to your purposes, use the Finance data warehouse to extract budget data to another reporting tool, or you have downloaded the Crystal Report template “Monthly Fund Summary by account (perm and temp)” from our website, this e-mail is important for you.

Due to the FY11 changes, many documents processed in July and intended for fiscal period 03, were assigned a fiscal period of 02. Specifically, the system assigned the incorrect fiscal period to the following fields: “adopted budget”, “adjusted budget”, “temporary budget” and “transaction amount”  (for budget amounts only). These fields were posted to fiscal period 02, whereas the “accounted budget” field, a cumulative or summary budget field, was assigned a period of 03, for the same transactions. Anytime you use a formula field with “accounted budget” along with any one of the other fields indicated above, you will get erroneous results from the cumulative views (these that have the word “balances” in the title of the view). Additionally, if you use a “transaction” view, period 03 will have incomplete budget data.

The problem described above is isolated to the month of July 2010 and is specific to the breakdown between permanent budget and temporary budget amounts, however, it does not impact the Budget data warehouse views, because there is no concept of fiscal period in the Budget Module. Additionally, most finance-centric reports built by central Finance, that present a single budget column are not affected by this issue as they use the accounted budget column only, as a result, templates on the Financial Services web site are not affected by this issue.

What can you do?

-  If you have downloaded the “Monthly Fund Summary by account (perm and temp)” template from our website, please refresh your version with the one currently on our website  (https://www.mcgill.ca/financialservices/reporting/ >> Budget Reports for 1A and 1B funds >> Integrated Budget & Finance >> ), it has been modified to correct for the above problem.

-  If you create your own templates or extracts using the “balances” views, you can redirect your reports to use a “transaction” view. In this case, you must also query for fiscal periods up to and including the period you want (i.e. fiscal period <= 03 (July)), instead of querying on just the period you want (i.e. fiscal period = 03 (July).

-  If you have previously requested templates tailor made to your purposes, please contact the originator of your template(s) so it may be updated to correct for this problem.

If you have any questions or concerns do not hesitate to contact me,

Roula

Roula Mpekios, CGA

Senior Manager, Office of the Budget

McGill University

James Administration Bldg

845 Sherbrooke St. W Room 633