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What
is Financial Systems
Update?
Financial
Systems Update replaces SAP@MIT
News,
the electronic newsletter formerly
published by the Management Reporting
Project. Staff from the Controller's
Accounting Office, Financial Systems
Services (see
article),
and the Office of the Executive Vice
President coordinate the publication of
Financial Systems Update. We will include
practical updates on the new financial and
reporting tools in use at the Institute.
Comments and suggestions for future
articles are welcome! Please email the
entire editorial board at fss-eboard@mit.edu,
or contact individual members listed in
the publisher's
box.
Each
issue of Financial Systems Update will be
announced by an email message to the SAP
User community at MIT. We hope that you
will find this new Web-based newsletter
practical and informative.
You
can still access archived copies of SAP@MIT
News.
_______________________________
All
Financial Transactions Must Now Use "7/6"
Format
Since MIT central offices began using SAP
in 1996, other financial operations have
gradually been converted to use (or be
compatible with) SAP. As of
July
1, 1999,
all financial systems that interact with
SAP use the new SAP "7/6" financial
architecture, where 7-digit "cost objects"
replace account numbers and 6-digit
"general ledger accounts" (also called
"cost elements") replace object codes.
All
financial transactions--not just
electronic ones--should now use the 7/6
format. This includes:
- Paper
requisitions (to partners, internal
providers, or Procurement)
- Transactions
at the Cashier's Office
- Yellow
Requests for Payment
- Travel
reservations through MIT's approved
travel agencies
- Travel
advance requests and trip
reports
- Invoice
approvals
- Requests
for Personnel
As
of September 1, 1999, transactions
not using the 7/6 format will be returned
to the originator for
correction.
The
existing inventory of paper forms that
refer to "account number" and "object
code" can still be used. Just put a 7-digit
cost object number in the "account number"
field and a 6-digit general
ledger account number in the "object code"
field. CAO has web-accessible versions of
forms already set up for the 7/6 format.
See the MIT
Administrative Templates web
page
for these forms.
As
of September 1, 1999, the one-to-one
mapping between the old and new financial
architecture will be broken so that the
full range of 7-digit cost objects can be
used. Backward compatibility to legacy
account numbers will no longer be
available.
As
of September 1, 1999:
- The
Internal Provider and departmental SAP
Journal Voucher Upload programs will no
longer accept the legacy 5/3 format.
All journal voucher line items must use
the 7/6 format.
- Any
departmental or internal provider
systems that interact with SAP must be
able to use the 7/6 architecture (as
most currently do).
Department,
lab, and center (DLC) staff with questions
or concerns about the conversion to the
new architecture should contact their
assigned school or area coordinator. If
you are not sure who your coordinator is,
please contact John Hynes at 8-6220
(hynes@mit.edu).
Internal Providers should contact
Procurement.
The
long-awaited goal of completely moving to
the new financial architecture is now in
sight. Your assistance and active
cooperation in reaching this goal is
deeply appreciated.
_______________________________
Introducing
Financial Systems
Services
Last
spring, Executive Vice President John
Curry announced the establishment of a new
organization: Financial System Services
(FSS). This new organization, headed by
Chuck Shaw, is charged with coordinating
the development, delivery and maintenance
of effective financial systems for the
Institute. Staff came to FSS from the
Audit Division, the Controller’s
Accounting Office, Information Systems,
Procurement, and the Management Reporting
Project. Financial Systems Services is
made up of five teams: Financial,
Procurement/LDS, Infrastructure, Community
Support, and FSS Management.
Each
of these teams will be introduced in
future issues of Financial Systems Update.
This issue features the Community Support
Team.
Who's
Who on the Community Support Team?
Led by John Hynes, the Community Support
Team includes the school and area
coordinators (S/ACs) and the Training and
Documentation group. While the
responsibilities of the school
coordinators are similar to that of the
area coordinator, there is one important
distinction. The school coordinators
report jointly to Doreen Morris in the
Provost's Office and John Hynes in FSS;
this dual reporting recognizes their close
ties to the academic areas. The area
coordinator is responsible for SAP
implementation in the central
administrative areas; she reports solely
within FSS.
Each
school coordinator works with an assistant
dean and the departments in that School.
The school coordinators and their
current
assignments are:
- Bob
Davine (Vice President for Research and
Sloan School)
- Jennifer
Kratochwill (School of
Engineering)
- Eileen
Nielsen (School of Architecture and
Planning, School of
Engineering)
- Judith
Stein (School of Humanities and Social
Sciences, School of
Science)
- Brian
Tavares (School of Science, Provost's
Office, President's Office)
Shirley
Picardi is currently the sole
area
coordinator; her responsibilities include
all of the central administrative areas.
To provide additional service to the many
customers in the central areas, a search
is about to be launched for a second area
coordinator.
Members
of the Training and Documentation group
are:
- Jane
Cooney (SAP trainer and group leader
for the Training and Documentation
group)
- Karlyne
Hutchings (SAP end-user
documentation)
- Daniel
Pope (SAP end-user
documentation).
School/Area
Coordinators' Workplan
Following the successful completion of
the SAP Purchasing rollout at the end of
1998, the school/area coordinators (S/ACs)
spent the spring months meeting
individually with MIT's DLCs. These
meetings helped the S/ACs identify
reporting needs -- to make sure that each
unit could continue to generate essential
financial reports after the shutdown of
the legacy system. In April and May, the
S/ACs (along with the Training group)
organized presentations of "Managing Your
Cost Objects in SAP," an overview of the
new on-line financial tools geared to
Institute administrative and fiscal
officers. Over 130 AOs and FOs attended
the presentation.
With
the start of the new fiscal year, S/ACs
are "making rounds" by scheduling regular
visits with each unit. Topics for these
visits are determined by the department,
but can include learning more about the
SAP reports on the MIT Financial Systems
(z-mit) menu, creating custom SAP or Data
Warehouse reports, or other topics as
requested by the department. The balance
of the S/ACs' time is spent doing
"homework" from these departmental visits
and participating in FSS groups working on
SAP and Data Warehouse reports,
authorization issues, and other business
topics.
Training
and Documentation Group Workplan
With the completion of the Purchasing
rollout and the creation of FSS, the SAP
Training and Documentation group was
reduced in size. The group's mission,
however, remains the same: to deliver the
training and documentation resources
needed to use SAP effectively.
Ongoing
classes are offered in several areas
including Basic Skills, Journal Vouchers,
Requisitioning and Approving, and
Reporting. The group is continuing to
develop courses for new features as well
as creating computer-based training for
those who prefer to learn at their own
pace and or at their own desks. For
current course descriptions, see the
SAP
training Web
page.
The
documentation group has begun to create a
new Web-based documentation system. With
the new system, documents can be read
directly from the Web and printed without
the need for Adobe Acrobat Reader. They
will be searchable, and there will be a
glossary of SAP terms. The system is
currently being tested for usability and
is expected to be available in November
1999.
Additionally,
user documentation is constantly being
updated to reflect changes to the SAP
system. Most notable are changes to the
Summary
Statement and the Account Manager's
Report
and Purchasing/Payment
reports.
_______________________________
Three
Telephone Changes Presented at July SAP
User Group
John
Hynes (Community Support Team, Financial
Systems Services) welcomed the community
to the July SAP User Group on "Changes to
Telephone Call Report Monitoring." Nancy
Dykstra (Controllers Accounting Office)
and Mary Weisse (Data Warehouse) presented
the "why, what and how" of telephone
policy changes, changes in the types of
telephone data stored, and changes in how
DLCs access the data.
Why
Did MIT's Telephone Policy Change?
The Controller's Accounting Office
recently conducted a cost analysis of
reimbursements for personal telephone
calls. In fiscal year 1998, MIT processed
more than 1,400 cash vouchers for these
reimbursements. The total amount of money
collected in all these transactions was
approximately $59,000, only 1.8% of the
total phone charges billed to DLCs. Of
course, each cash voucher transaction
represents costs in staff time both in the
DLC and in the central offices. Given the
high volume/low value context of this
process, a proposal to revise MIT's Policy
on Personal Phone Calls was proposed, and
approved by the Academic Council.
The
new
policy
(13.2.3)
reads:
- The
use of MIT's telephones is restricted
to Institute business and necessary
personal telephone calls. Necessary
personal telephone calls include calls
to arrange family and personal
schedules, medical-related calls and
other reasonable calls; these calls
should be brief. No reimbursement to
MIT is required for such
calls.
- Telephone
calls related to personal businesses
and activities are prohibited unless a
personal telephone credit card is used
or an explicit agreement for
reimbursement to MIT has been
established with the appropriate
organization.
What
Are the Changes to the Types of Telephone
Data Stored?
After June 1999, call detail will not
be available for direct dialed calls in
these eastern Massachusetts area codes:
508, 617, 781, 978. Formerly, detail was
provided for all of 508, 978 and some of
781. Only summary information (total
minutes and dollars) will be available
under the heading of "Local Summary
Charges" in the new Data Warehouse
reports. This change means that fewer toll
calls will need sorting and reconciliation
by the DLCs.
Where
Do DLCs Access the New Telephone Data?
As of July 1, 1999, MIT's Data
Warehouse will be the telephone charge
reporting system of record. $SumMIT will
no longer be used for reconciling phone
charges. (Note: Historical $SumMIT
telephone data will remain
available.)
The
Data
Warehouse
is an information storage site that can be
used by an MIT employee to access a
variety of well-defined current
administrative data. Along with other
pre-built financial reports, the Data
Warehouse team has created several
standard telephone reports for DLCs to use
in reconciling telephone costs. Mary
Weisse demonstrated how to download and
process the "Telephone Charges by
Extension" and "Telephone DTR" reports.
The presentation also included two
handouts: Standard Telephone Reports
Screen Images and Downloading &
Running Standard Telephone Reports in
BrioQuery (v5.5.). Both of these
reports are available by contacting
warehouse@mit.edu.
_______________________________
Three Special Topics Presented at August
SAP User Group
After
welcoming approximately 50 people to the
August SAP User Group meeting, FSS
Community Support Team leader John Hynes
made several announcements:
- If
you would like to stop receiving paper
monthly statements for your cost
objects, contact Mary Ann Donofrio
(donofrio@mit.edu
or x3-2792). Specify "Mail Code 5" to
stop both copies of the paper
statements; "Mail Code 3" to stop only
the account supervisor's copy; and
"Mail Code 4" to stop only the account
addressee's copy.
- To
suggest topics for a future SAP User
Group meeting, send email to
fss-ug@mit.edu.
- MIT
will be totally converted to the "7/6"
financial architecture by September
1, 1999.
(See
related
article
in this issue of Financial Systems
Update.)
Formal
presentations included "Cost Element
Groups" and "GL Account Project" by
Gillian Emmons (Controller's Accounting
Office) and "How to Create and Use Report
Variants" by Robert Davine (Financial
Systems Services).
Cost
Element Groups
MIT currently uses 719 cost elements
(or GL accounts). (Cost elements were
known as object codes in the legacy
system.) Cost
element
groups
have been created in an SAP hierarchy to
aggregate various cost elements into
certain groups for reporting on or
monitoring specific categories of
financial transactions.
Centrally
maintained "cost element groups" are named
with the prefix "CEMIT" in SAP. CEMIT
followed by a dash and one alpha or
numeric character connotes a "complete"
cost element group. Examples include
CEMIT-0, which is used with the Summary
Statement and DTR reports, and CEMIT-A,
which is used to support a new type of
settlement process for Media Lab
Consortia.
The
specific elements of any cost element
group can be viewed by drill-down from the
selection screen in SAP, in the Master
Data section on the z-mit menu, and in the
Data Warehouse "GL Account Report" table.
(For more information on cost element
groups, please read the appendix of the
Summary
Statement & Detail Transaction Report
User
Guide.)
Cost
element groups are used in SAP in a
variety of reports, including the Summary
Statement, the DTR, and the Profit Center
Volume Report. Using cost element group
CEMIT-EX06, for example, it is possible to
run a customized Summary Statement in SAP
showing only travel expenses. Cost element
groups are also available in the Data
Warehouse.
Cost
element groups are flexible, visible, and
documented. Unlike object codes in the
legacy system (where users could not see
the component parts), it is always
possible to see which SAP cost elements
are in each cost element group. User
suggestions on cost element groups are
invited; send email to reporting@mit.edu.
GL
Account Project
The General Ledger (GL) Account
Project was started in the spring of 1999.
The project's objectives were:
- to
provide clear, widely understood
account definitions
- simplicity
- to
be of sufficient depth and complexity
to meet the needs of MIT's diverse
businesses
- to
support tracking of key elements of
cost and revenue.
The
project's strategy is to write clear,
consistent definitions, to block unused GL
accounts for fiscal year 2000, to add
needed new GL accounts, and to block vague
or duplicate GL accounts for fiscal year
2001. The goal of this clean-up is to
allow for better financial
analyses.
Draft
definitions of GL accounts and a list of
unused GL accounts that will be blocked
September 1 are available for review by
sending a request to reporting@mit.edu.
The new GL account definitions will be
published in draft form on the Web in
September 1999. Recommendations on this
project should be complete by late fall of
1999. Comments or concerns are welcome;
send email to reporting@mit.edu.
How
to Create and Use Report Variants
A report variant is a template in SAP that
allows the user to set specific parameters
and save them for repeated use. For
example, users can create a variant for
the Summary Statement in which the same
cost element group and cost objects are
selected each month. Bob Davine
demonstrated how to create variants, how
to find them and reuse them after they
have been created, how to change variants
by "overwriting" them, and how to delete
variants.
Users
were asked to conform to the naming
conventions for any variants created. The
first two digits of a variant's name are
"RV" (for Report Variant), followed by the
first four digits of the profit center
number, a hyphen, and up to seven
additional characters chosen by the user
(e.g., RV0975-testvar).
Since
the variant menu is open to all users, it
is possible to select someone else's
variant and inadvertently overwrite or
alter it. Taking care when selecting or
saving variants will prevent this from
occurring. (Note: a user cannot run
someone else's variant reports unless they
have reporting authorization on the cost
objects selected in the
variant.)
Variants
can be used with most reports on the z-mit
menu. For more information, please read
Creating
Report
Variants.
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