In an effort to improve the financial reporting environment for Saint Mary’s faculty and staff budget managers, we are pleased to introduce some updates to the reporting that is currently available via the faculty and staff portal. These changes also support a significant, yet unseen, improvement in the programming of reports via the Management Viewer tool, which will save a great deal of staff time on future report maintenance.
The existing “Budget By Account Number” has been renamed to “Single Budget Analysis.” This has been the only portal-based financial report available to budget managers, and while this new version works in much the same way, there are some important changes:
- Rows have been reorganized to show Revenues (as applicable) before Payroll and Non-Payroll expenses.
- Revenues now appear on the report(s) as positive values (versus the default negative values as stored in the database).
- The “Spent YTD” and “Remaining Balance” columns have been replaced with “YTD Activity,” “Variance vs. Budget,” and “YTD % of Budget.”
- Selection of desired fiscal year and budget code (via drop-down boxes) remain the same.
A new report, “Current or Prior Year Budget Analysis,” has been added to provide a deeper, contemporary financial analysis.
- While the selection of the budget code to be examined is similar to the existing report, the user will only choose between the current fiscal year or the most recently completed fiscal year.
- Additional columns are included to reflect budget performance:
- “Original Budget,” meaning the budget adopted by the BOT prior to the fiscal year which will remain fixed for the entire fiscal year
- “Adjusted Budget,” which will reflect any substantive changes/reforecasts within the same fiscal year (e.g. subsequent to final fall or spring enrollments)
Additional documentation, step-by-step access instructions, and links to the new reports are available in the “Financial Reporting” panel on the Business Office section of Inside Pages or via the “My Reports” section in the faculty and staff portal (both sources require logging in). If you have any questions, please contact me at dulaszek@smumn.edu or Ext. 4550.