July, 2017
From the Editor
It’s July, a time for vacations, picnics, beach trips, and preparing to avoid the construction on Commonwealth Ave. bridge. It’s also time to present this latest issue of the BW Newsletter. As always, I hope you find this issue of the Newsletter informative. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future BW Newsletters.
Bill Stewart
Training Calendar
July/August Training Opportunities
Introductory Workshops
As is true each month, an assortment of introductory workshops will be available. These sessions present to new employees – or employees assigned a new business role – the fundamentals of reporting for a particular subject area. The sessions are a great way to review material, too. Even if you previously attended an intro session, you are likely to learn new things about reporting – or to be reminded of concepts that you had forgotten.
Click on any of the following links for a course description and/or to register for an upcoming session:
Supplier Resource Management Reporting
Labor Distribution (Payroll) Reporting
Tips & Tricks
Departmental Text Conventions
During a recent training workshop, we spent some of our time viewing recent transactions for one of the attendees’ departmental expense activity reports. It was easy to understand things like the individual or lab for whom a purchase was made, what project (or sub-project) was involved, and so forth. Why was it so easy? Because that department adheres to an internal convention that requires administrators to note the who, what, where and why related to an expense. By “internal convention,” I mean a consistent way of documenting activity – in a way and a format that makes sense to that department.
BUworks contains a great deal of data to provide you with insight into expenses of various types; revenues, too. The point is, though, that you can record even more information by using system comment and free text fields when they are available. This can make your life much easier when you’re trying to better understand activity displayed in your BW reports. If your department is not currently using some sort of convention like this, it’s worthy of your consideration.
Filter Key Figures Based on Threshold Values
Have you ever wanted to remove all of the $0 commitment amounts in your list of open commitments? Or do you need to find all expenses above a specific threshold amount? Or how about finding purchases that fall within a particular range of dollar amounts? If so, this document describes how to do exactly that: BW How to – Filter Key Figures using the Condition Function
Employee Absence Tracking Report
Do you need to construct a list of employees in your organization that shows time accrued and time used for vacation, sick time, and personal days? The Employee Absence Tracking report allows you to view, for a single month or a date range, for one or more employees in an Organizational Unit (depending, of course, on your security permissions). Access to the report is limited to Payroll Coordinators, Managers and Time Keepers.
The report is accessed via the Reporting / Human Capital Management / Time Management folder. This document describes how to run the report and to understand the information returned: BW How to run – HCM Employee Absence Tracking report – historical view.
End Notes
Custom Training Sessions
Have you ever thought that it would be really useful if you could get members of your department together with a trainer to focus on BUworks functionality that is specific to the work your department does? I’m happy to work with any department or group that would like to develop and conduct a custom basic- or intermediate-level reporting training session. There are only two requirements for such a session: (1) input from the group is necessary to develop a relevant agenda, and (2) the group should include four or more employees. If you’re interested in discussing the development of a custom session for your department or school/college, contact me via email or give me a call at 617-353-6382.
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