UPDATE (Thursday, June 25th):
We received the following update from our software support group in Shrewsbury. This information replaces any of our previous communications regarding payroll encumbrance:
Per the questions that were brought up at the CPM Meeting today on nightly encumbrances, I have found out the following:
- Nightly Encumbrances have not been run successfully since 6/10/09.
- The HR team has been working on correcting the program and were willing to run them tonight, but the GL team this afternoon decided to not run them tonight since we hadn’t had time to test the changes and it is getting late in year and some campuses have closed off when they will accept anymore POs. It was a question of all campuses running or none.
- The 2 week liquidation of encumbrances will run tonight, Wednesday June 24th.
- We don’t have any plans of running the nightly encumbrances again until Thursday July 9th. We always stop the nightly encumbrance on the Thursday after the last full payroll in the current year and then restart it after the full encumbrance gets run for the new fiscal year. That happens on the Wednesday of close week and this year it will be on July 8th.
Some questions that came about based on not running the nightly encumbrance and how it impacts current year and the new year:
1. If nightly encumbrances are not run for the current year then any account changes, commitment changes, etc will not get picked up for FY2009.
2. Since they won’t get picked up then the liquidations that occur every two weeks will be done against their prior chart string.
3. When we hit FY2010 the account changes that were made, but not brought over to finance, will get picked up when we run the full year encumbrance for FY2010. Any commitment changes (for FY2009) that were made since June 10th (the last time nightly encumbrances ran) will not get picked up in FY2010 since they were specific to FY2009.
UPDATE (Saturday June 20th): UITS is still working to complete the process needed to liquidate encumbrances. This has taken longer than expected and we hope to have it resolved on Monday – June 22nd).
To: Campus Department Managers
Finance System Users
Timekeepers
From: Steven O’Riordan, Associate Vice Chancellor Financial Services
John Giarusso, Executive Director of Human Resources
Date: June 17, 2009
Subject: Payroll Encumbrance for FY2009
There are significant technical issues with the payroll encumbrance process. A number of UMass Lowell departments have reported issues with payroll encumbrances and the adverse impact on their ability to spend remaining funds this fiscal year. This problem is affecting all UMass campuses and we are working with our colleagues at UITS and on the other campuses to determine appropriate corrective actions.
In reviewing the options presented to us, our goal is a solution that would promptly free up available budget for departments to use at year end. Therefore, we have opted to stop encumbering payroll within the e*mpac Finance system through the end of FY2009. Effective later this week, you will no longer have any payroll encumbrances impacting your budget.
Departments remain responsible for applicable payroll expenses. Departments must still account for payroll spending and not exceed the allotted budget for the fiscal year. Even though there isn’t an encumbrance posted, the payroll expenditures will still apply to your account as they are processed.
For planning purposes, you should be aware that the remaining payroll expenditures to be posted against this fiscal year are as follows:
- A full pay period ending 6/20/09 (6/7/09 ‘ 6/20/09)
- The week of 6/27/09 (6/21/09-6/27/09)
- 3/7th of a week for the week of July 4th (6/28/09-6/30/09)
New reports will be produced and available via the report distribution tool ‘ we will notify you again once this process has occurred and these reports are available. The primary impacted Finance reports include UMGM7079, UMGL7079, UMGL7045, UMGM7047 and also the online budget overview. As previously communicated, all purchasing activities must be fully processed by June 24th for this fiscal year.
We believe this solution provides the department with the needed access to budgets. We will continue to work with UITS to resolve this critical issue so that payroll can be encumbered to start fiscal year 2010.
On the Human Resources side, the HR Direct application will still provide payroll encumbrance data on reports such as UMCA801 (Payroll Commitment – Student) and UMPAY718 (Non-Student Payroll Commitment). These reports can be of assistance as you manually manage expected payroll expenditures against your budget. These payroll encumbrances do not stop a person from getting paid nor is it loading the encumbrance data into Finance for FY2009.
If you have questions regarding your available budget please contact the Budget Office at budgetoffice@uml.edu or x3510.