Finance FYI

Some of you may have noticed additional information in the commodity and unit of measure drop down lists. This data has been placed in BPRD to enable the first pilot groups to take advantage of USNH's eProcurement process.

USNH contracted with an eProcurement vendor, Unimarket, about 9 months ago to provide three deliverables related to purchasing activity; eProcurement, enhanced/automated bid processing and an automated vendor create and maintenance process. USNH has been working with Unimarket to construct electronic communication between our systems to streamline the purchasing process.

The first deliverable, eProcurement, is being rolled out to areas slowly. The first two pilot units, COLSA and IT BSCs, are enabled starting today, Monday, August 23. Others will be enabled over the next months.

What is eProcurement? This is an electronic purchasing mechanism which enables direct electronic communication between the buyer (USNH) and the supplier (many of our vendors). An electronic mechanism is generally web-based and provides online catalog shopping with shopping carts, etc. where USNH's contracted prices for goods are displayed to the user. This means you can see what the prices you really will be charged are at the time of purchase without trying to calculate it yourself.

This is the first roll out of the first deliverable. We are all very excited about this effort and hope you all will be as well. More information will be coming over the next few months.

Thanks - Denise Smith & Alice Samuel

The Finance/HR Banner upgrade is coming up the end of September. You will be seeing several email messages regarding this effort with schedules refined as we get closer and closer to the actual date. There are not a lot of changes impacting users. This upgrade is more of a technical upgrade, but it also situates Banner users to be ready and able to adopt more complex processing in the future. A full list of any changes will be available by the end of August for your review.

The 8x environment is available to all users of BPRD. It is a test instance listed off the Gateway page named UTST. Your access should be the same username/password that you have in BPRD (unless you have changed your password in the last 6 months). Your access to data in the finance area should be the same as it is in BPRD. Click here to see a graphical representation of accessing UTST.

All Users are welcome to access the environment as they choose. Should you have any issues accessing the UTST environment, please contact your campus help desk.

While there are few changes to the Banner forms impacting users, the Banner 8x upgrade includes a change in the underlying data structure which enables foreign addresses and other information to be more accurately reflected in the Banner tables. Unfortunately, this creates a significant effort for our IT folks as each and every record in our database must be examined for changes to the underlying structure. USNH has undertaken several test runs of this conversion and are confident that the task will complete successfully, but it will take more time than we normally allot for an upgrade. To address that issue - Banner Finance/HR production environment will be unavailable for 2 days over the weekend and two business days.

Banner 8x Upgrade Schedule:

These dates have been selected based on activities that need to be accomplished in both the Finance and HR environments. There is an impact on USNH Payroll, which has been addressed by USNH Payroll office. Please see the HR web site for more information.

More information will be coming - all this will be accessible on the USNH Financial Services web site.

Banner 8x will be installed into production the end of September. Detail dates will be coming later today and will be posted to the USNH Financial Services web page (http://finadmin.usnh.edu/).

Many of you have assisted in testing this upgrade over the past months. In a continued effort to make certain this upgrade will function as expected for all users, we will be conducting a Stress test on Wednesday, August 11th between 2 PM and 4 PM.

This test will cover both Finance and HR activities and users.

All users who have an opportunity to access the test system during this time will be happily received. Detailed access instructions can be found at: http://finadmin.usnh.edu/finance_fyi/logontoutst.pdf

Every user who was a user in BPRD as of March 2010 should have the same access in UTST that they have in BPRD.

If you have changed your password, are a new users since March or have had security changes to your accounts in either Finance or HR will have the access that you had as of March 2010.

All password issues should be directed to your campus help desk - any other issues please direct to Carolyn Spooner.

No significant amount of processing is required - querying forms or just looking around at the environment will be immensely helpful.

Thank you all in advance for your assistance.

There have been some questions concerning old year payroll encumbrances and expenses. As you are aware, 13th month will be closed tonight. As part of closing 13th month, the following will occur:

The general ledger and encumbrances were rolled on Wednesday, June 30 and should also appear in the MR data from last night's refresh. All balances have been brought forward into FY 2011 and dual year processing is in effect. Please see the Old Year/New Year document for appropriate processing of activity. All old year activity should be processed into the system by Friday, July 9. Thirteenth month will be closed on Wednesday, July 14 at which time the remaining grant budgets will be rolled into FY 2011. If you have any questions regarding Old Year/New Year processing, please see the Old Year/New Year document. If that does not resolve your questions, please see the "For Assistance" section for the appropriate contact persons at each of the campuses.

Thanks and have a great New Year!