Changes to Commitment Control’s Ledger Groups Coming Soon

Beginning July 1, if you use ConnectCarolina for entering transactions, you may notice that budget checking runs a little more quickly.  If you use the system for keeping track of your budget as well, you may notice some other changes.

Why Are We Changing?

ConnectCarolina organizes expense and revenue ledgers into groups and currently, there are 18 ledger groups.  Every time you make a purchase or move funds in ConnectCarolina, your transaction gets recorded in as many as 9 of those ledger groups.  What this means is that millions of transaction lines have been created since the Finance go-live in October 2014, and all of those transactions have to be processed and stored.

The changes to ledger groups will reduce the number of transaction lines created and will, in turn, speed up the budget checking that happens overnight and decrease the amount of data that the University needs to store.

Here’s What’s Changing

Although many of the changes to simplify budgeting improve the performance of the system and are behind-the-scenes, there are some that you may notice, especially if you work with budget ledgers in the system.

If you do budgeting in the system, you need to know:

• You will see new ledger groups called “FAST” (which stands for F&A, State and Trust).  There will be a FAST expense ledger group and a FAST revenue ledger group.  This group will combine the State, F&A, and Trust ledger groups that currently exist in ConnectCarolina.  There are no changes to the OSR or OSR parent ledger groups.
• Even though State, F&A, and Trust will be combined into FAST, only State and F&A transactions will be recorded in the FAST parent ledger.  If in the future, the Office of Budget, Planning & Analysis decides to control State and F&A funds, they’ll be able to use the FAST parent ledger to do so.  There are no plans to use the system to control Trust funds.
• There are nine account codes that are being removed as budget rollups and consolidated with other accounts.  The chart below shows the account codes that are being removed and the account code that will need to be used going forward.  The account codes in the left column will be invalid on July 1, 2017.

If you create budget journals and transfers, you need to know:

• Since State, F&A and Trust will be in the same ledger group, the “Generate Parent Budget” checkbox will automatically be marked, even for trust funds.  Similarly, you will need to choose the Parent Budget Entry Type for trust funds, as you do now for State and F&A.
• You should still submit separate budget journals or transfers for State, F&A, and Trust funds, even though the system will let you combine them on one budget journal or transfer.  TIP:   You can mention “State”, “F&A”, or “Trust” in the journal description to make it easier to find transactions later.
• If you are one of the small group of people who use an Excel template to upload budget transactions into the system, you will need to use an updated template. The updated template will be available on the Budget, Planning & Analysis website in the Budgets and Fringe section.

If you run reports, you need to know:

• In ConnectCarolina, it’s best to create new inquiries for FAST, FAST_PAR, and FAST_REV when using the Budgets Overview inquiry.  You can use the old ones for your historical reporting needs.
• In ConnectCarolina, you will choose the FAST, FAST_PAR, or FAST_REV ledger group starting with fiscal year 2018, and use the fund value or fund range to report specifically on State, F&A, or Trust funds.
• In InfoPorte, you will choose the fund type, instead of the ledger, whether you are pulling data for the old ledger groups or the new.

More Information Available

To keep up to date with the changes, you can check out our Budgets Related page at ccinfo.unc.edu by clicking on Finance and then Budgets-Related Resources.  We’ll update this page with resources when they’re ready.

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