Volume 1 – 2021

It has been a while! I hope everyone is managing well through the pandemic. Let’s get to what’s new. For this newsletter, my focus is on catching you up with changes made to multiple reports across each of the functional areas. Many of the changes are small, but they have the potential to be significant improvements for some report users. The other news involves upcoming workshops dedicated to fiscal year-end close. The workshops target financial administrators with experience running BW Funds Management reports. For more information, refer to the Training Calendar below.

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 Newsletter topics.

Bill Stewart

News

Several reports in the functional areas listed below were enhanced.

Grants Management

Shopper is now available as a free characteristic in these GM Reports: Grant Document for Expenditures and Grant Document for Commitments.

The GM Master Data – Revenue & AR report was updated to include Parked Documents.

Full proposal titles (no longer broken into multiple Free Characteristics) are now available in the Proposal Detail report.

Funds Management

The following changes were made to the Transaction detail report:

  • The SC# field was replaced with SC/PR# to reflect that purchasing data is now being pulled from Ariba. Note that this field is initially displayed both as key and text. If you are someone who relies on a fixed layout to export data and import into an existing Excel spreadsheet, the expansion from one to two columns will cause trouble. You can solve this problem by changing the field’s properties to show only one of the two parts. Simply drag out the part, key or text, that you don’t need.
  • Final Invoice Indicator was added. When this flag has a value of “X,” it indicates that a Purchase Order has been closed (otherwise, the value displayed will be “not assigned”).
  • PR Name is available as a Free Characteristic. This data had previously been available only in the Purchasing Document Lifecycle report.
  • The Text field length has been expanded from 40 to 60 characters so that longer transaction descriptions can be accommodated.

SAP Ariba / Guided BUying / SRM

The following data fields were added to the Purchasing Document Lifecycle (PDL) report:

    • Purchase order line numbers (PO Line Number)
    • Shopping Cart / Purchase Requisitions line numbers (SC / PR Line Number)

Human Capital Management

The three labor distribution reports, Labor Distributions: Payroll Inquiry by Distribution (PA12), Labor Distributions: Payroll Inquiry by Employee (PA15), and Labor Distributions: Funds Center were moved to the new Payroll (Distributed) folder.

Another new folder, COVID Compliance (Distributed) was added. The folder contains two reports – compliance by group and compliance by individual – and is available to anyone with either the MSS Manager or Payroll Coordinator role.

Tips & Tricks

Revised Help Guides – Just in Time for Fiscal Year-end Close

With the end of the fiscal year approaching, it seemed like a good time to revise and publicize two documents that should prove useful to many of you. The How to View Open Commitments Guide has been completely rewritten and now includes information on exploring commitments related to purchase orders, ISRs and FSRs, and grant subawards. The second Help Guide, How to View ISR and FSR Activity, describes the steps recommended to focus on ISRs and FSRs. 

Training Calendar – April and May Training Opportunities

All workshops are online only

Introductory Workshops
An assortment of introductory workshops is offered every month. These sessions introduce the fundamentals of BW reporting for each of the BUworks functional areas. 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:

Funds Management Reporting

Grants Management Reporting

Reporting for Shoppers and Approvers

Labor Distribution (Payroll) Reporting

Intermediate-level Workshop

Fiscal Year-end Working Session

This working session will be co-led by the BW Reporting trainer and a member of the General Accounting / Financial Affairs staff and will be driven by attendees’ questions regarding the fiscal year-end close. We will primarily use Funds Management reports – but may venture into a Guided BUying report – to answer questions related to budget reconciliation, open commitments, ISR’s and FSR’s, and, if time allows, Purchase Requisitions, purchase orders, and invoices. This workshop is targeted at financial administrators tasked with all or some part of the Fiscal Year-end closing process. Participants should be comfortable running Business Warehouse Funds Management reports (this is not an intro workshop).

Notes

Custom Training Sessions

Have you ever thought that it would be 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? Many of your colleagues have reached out to me and we developed workshops tailored to their specific reporting interests. I’m happy to work with any department or group that would like to develop and conduct a custom intermediate-level 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 three 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.

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