Inquire on Funds Available

The Funds Available Inquiry form combines information from the Account Balances table and the BC Packets Table, a table used to track reserved funds until the transactions for these funds are posted to the Account Balances table.

Important facts about this form:

• The amounts included on the Funds Available Inquiry form include both posted journals and unposted journals in the approval process (workflow) for which funds have been approved. Therefore, amounts must be verified before distribution and, generally, unposted data should be removed if it may be used by someone who expects it to agree with BPRs or financials, both of which only include posted data.
• You must identify a budget to which to compare actuals and encumbrances.
• The Budget defines the Accounting Periods to be included on the form.
• The Accounting Period defaults to the first defined period for the Budget. Normally, the user will have to change the Period to the period for which the information is requested.
• All currently defined Budgets except PJTD PLANT are for a single fiscal year.
• The PJTD PLANT budget covers from the earliest Accounting Period for which data has been loaded (JUL-96) through the last available period.
• The purpose of the PJTD PLANT budget is to be able to load a budget for a project (other than Grants) that crosses fiscal years which can compare actuals and encumbrances to that project-to-date budget.
• Amount Type defaults to Year To Date Extended but the Amount Type can be one of the following:
  • Period To Date (this selection only used the budget for the Accounting Period selected. In other words, if an Accounting Period of Aug-03 is selected and an Amount Type of Period To Date is selected, only the budget for Aug-03 is used. The budget for Jul-03 is not included in the budget amount displayed in the Budget column.)
  • Quarter To Date Extended (this selection adds together the budgets for the first period in the quarter through the period chosen to display. In other words, if an Accounting Period of Nov-03 is selected and an Amount Type of Quarter To Date Extended is selected, the budgets for Oct-03 and Nov-03 are combined and displayed in the Budget column. The budgets for Jul-03, Aug03, and Sep-03 are not included in the budget amount displayed in the Budget column)
  • Year To Date Extended (this is the form’s default Amount Type. Extended (this selection adds together the budgets for the first period in the quarter through the period chosen to display. In other words, if an Accounting Period of Aug-03 is selected and an Amount Type of Quarter To Date Extended is selected, the budgets for Jul-03 and Aug-03 are combined and displayed in the Budget column.)
  • Project To Date (this selection adds together all budget amounts in the system through the period chosen to display. In other words, if an Accounting Period of Aug-03 is selected and an Amount Type of Project To Date is selected, all PJTD PLANT budgets for Jul-96 through the Aug-03 are combined and displayed in the Budget column. NOTE: This does not infer that all budgets are combined, just budgets loaded into the PJTD PLANT budget are combined. Currently, there is little use of this type of budgeting)
• Encumbrance Type defaults to ALL. This means that the amounts shown in the Encumbrance column include all four encumbrance types:
  • Commitments
  • Obligations
  • Manual (Invoices)
  • Manual Projections (budget reservations; currently only used by ISS; an example of this type of encumbrance would be to reserve some travel budget for an approved future travel; manual projections must be manually released by the department using them; all manual projections are zeroed out at fiscal year end prior to carrying forward encumbrances into the next fiscal year.)
• Manual Projection an Manual (Invoices) are combined into the Encumbrance Amount field called Other if an Encumbrance Type of ALL is used. If the Accounting Flexfield contains both Manual (Invoices) and Manual Projections and the user needs this amount separated, the user should run the form for each of these Encumbrance Types to obtain the distinct amounts.
• Actual journal are reserved upon being submitted into Workflow. Therefore, the actual amount shown in the actual column includes all posted journal (that agrees to Account Inquiry) and all unposted journals that have been reserved. When differences occur between an actual amount showing in the actual column of the Funds Available Inquiry form and the Account Inquiry form, research must be done to determine the validity of these journals and unreserved and delete the abandoned journals.
• At each month end, the Office of the University Controller routinely deletes unposted manual journals with a balance type of Actual.
• Summary accounts are only updated during the Posting process. Accounting Flexfields are update when Funds Reservation occurs. In other words, if you view Summary Accounts on the Funds Available Inquiry form its totals may not agree to the Accounting Flexfields that comprise that Summary Account.
• The Funds Available Inquiry form recognizes the user’s security.
• Data shown on the Funds Available Inquiry form is sorted in the order that the AFFs were created. It is not sorted in AFF order. Therefore, it is important to look at all retrieved records when analyzing the data and not presume that gaps in the retrieved records mean that certain combinations don’t exist.

Example 1

Find the total expenditures for all funds belonging to a single organization.

Export to Excel

To export your retrieved data to Excel, select Export under Action on the menu.

NOTE: the first time you use this function, you have to tell your browser application what application to use to open this file. You can also direct your browser to ask you each time before automatically opening this type of file or to automatically open the file using Excel. Once the file is opened in Excel, it will look like as follows:

Use Excel functionality to expand the columns, change the format of the amount columns, sort the data by AFF, add a total line and sum the amount columns, and, for files exported via Funds Available Inquiry, you’ll need to add columnar headings. In Oracle, some forms export the columnar heading with this “Export” function, and others don’t. Also note that there are no Budgets showing in the Budget column for Grants data and for R-funds. This is because the Grants module does not send the budget data to the general ledger. And, the R-funds are not currently budgeted.

Example 2

Find the total travel costs by quarter for the first two quarters of FY04 for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Retrieve each quarter separately and combine the data. For the first quarter:

Follow the same pattern as example 1. Export data to Excel, add column headings and totals, remove lines with zero amounts, and verify that no unposted data is included. The Grants system does not send budgets to the general ledger. The general ledger does contain encumbrances for Grants because encumbrances on Grants feed directly to the general ledger from Payables and Purchasing.