March 2015 BAR MEETING
Everett Community College
March 12and 13, 2015
Thursday, March 12th
Welcome
Welcome provided by Dr. David Beyer, President of Everett Community College.
Logistics provided by Susan Dresser of Everett.
WELA
Jason Gordon, Bates Technical College.
Jason has been part of the WELA program and wanted to give the group information on it.
WELA started because administrators felt there weren’t qualified candidates applying for positions, so WELA was developed to help promote current employees. WELA is designed for exempt employees who want to move in to a vice president or president position. It is a one year leadership program.
For additional information, the WELA website is
Minutes
Minutes from the prior January meeting were approved.
ctcLink Update
Emmett Folk, Finance Functional Lead for ctcLink
They are in the middle of re-planning first link and the wave Go-Live dates. They expect a new date to be announced later this month.
Things colleges can be doing now to prepare for conversion? They have found pain point during conversion efforts that colleges could be working on now.
General Ledger Conversion – they are converting 2 years of historical, summary data and the current year’s detail data.
- Paint points have been ORG-INDX to Department crosswalks. You can make conversion easier if you inactivate or remove your old ORG-INDX values. Colleges could inactivate any ORG-INDEX that isn’t needed and hasn’t been used in the last 3 years.
Vendor/Supplier Conversion – merging legacy vendors at each of the colleges into one master supplier pool in PeopleSoft.
- Pain points. Having clean and complete address information helps convert more easily. Also having an up-to-date TIN for each vendor you use. Like vendors at difference colleges are merged based on TIN/SSN. They need to be able to know which vendors are really the same.
Budget Conversion – converting budget information for the current budget period – at the time of go-live.
- Pain points. Modeling your legacy budget structure to better match how PeopleSoft will use that budget data. Think about who needs to be able to do what kinds of budget development tasks (read only, modify, approve, etc.) for which “budgets”. They will provide us in advance of our go-live date, information on what the budget structure will look like in PeopleSoft. It will allow certain people to modify budgets, but those will have to be approved by whoever we set up with approval.
Unfulfilled Purchase Order Conversion – Purchase Orders that have not been fully received and/or invoiced. This is not Open POs. Some colleges track this manually, on an excel spreadsheet, have a purchasing system, etc.
- Pain points. Think about how you can identify which POs are “unfulfilled” so data related to them can be extracted for conversion. Conversion depends on the type of system each college is using to track our Purchase Orders and how we can extract that information. This conversion effort is done mostly through manual data collection and data entry. It has been a challenge at the Pilots to identify a fully closed Purchase Order.
Asset Conversion – converting capitalized and small & attractive assets per SAAM Chapter 30.
- Pain points. Identifying the accumulated depreciation amount for a single, depreciable asset, this can be difficult to obtain from FAE. Building out asset tracking locations within PeopleSoft Finance; identify the system you use today with the most complete and accurate building and room data.
Working Lunch – Everett’s Leadership Academy Presentation
Jeanne Leader, EvCC Dean of Arts & Learning Resources
Pat Sisneros, EvCC VP of College Services
Faculty, classified and exempt employees can all participate. Program runs October through May and they meet two Fridays per month. The group does a group project and focuses on developing teamwork skills. They have mentors, who are the prior year participants. Everett stole their academy process from Centralia College.
Travel Training
Bret Brodersen, OFM. Power point provided.
OFM’s SAAM Manual is the minimum regulations we are required to follow. You can have internal policies that are more restrictive. Chapter 10 of SAAM is related to travel and Chapter 70 includes Meals & Light Refreshments.
Travel regulations apply to all state employees, officers, and contractors (unless contract states otherwise). All travel regulations center around the criteria for being the most economical to the state and advantageous.
If travel plans have been altered due to the health and safety of the traveler, make sure the reason for any extra costs incurred is documented on the expense voucher – this is a requirement.
The state charge card system is required for air travel purchases. All out-of-state travel must be approved in advance by agency head, President. All travel to Hawaii or a foreign country must be pre-authorized by Board of Trustees.
If someone has a personal trip planned and decides to add in a couple of days of business related travel. You need to discuss this and get approval directly from OFM, because the policies don’t really address primarily personal travel. Regulations only cover business related travel and then adding on some personal travel days to that.
There is no statewide policy for the criteria allowing lodging back to back late night/early morning meetings if the location is less than 50 miles away. Each individual agency needs to establish a policy for their criteria on determining this.
1098-T Online Services for Students
Roselle Hay, Bellevue College
Bellevue College, borrowing the setup that Seattle Colleges use, created an online tool for students to access their 1098-T forms and information themselves. So instead of their Business Office handling tons of 1098-T calls this time of year and providing copies of forms, students can now access this information on their own. This has saved them a lot of time. If any colleges would like to implement this, contact Roselle at for more information.
BAR 101 – Topics
Susan Dresser
BAR 101 is a hands-on training in the details of our work. Accounts receivable and cashiering have been topics in the past. Susan is looking for people to volunteer to be on the committee and for ideas on topics. The next BAR 101 training may be in September 2015.
Hot topic ideas:
Fixed assets/FAE reconciliations
Balancing the 790 accounts
Data Express Training
Financial Statement prep methodology
Accounts Receivable processes
BM1620
GASB Updates – SAO is saying that we need to know ourselves.
Dept. of Revenue sales/use tax
Job Scheduling to produce 1098Ts
Learning how to write reports in PeopleSoft
New Allocation Model
DES Procurement Training
OMB Super Circular Training
FMS Basics – overview of what is available
SMART Entries and SMART Reports and how to resolve problems with those
Subledgers – how to reconcile and fix them
Repeat of Customer Accounts 101
IPEDS vs Financial Statements
BAR 101 then held a meeting while others were invited to tour Everett’s AMTEC program.
Friday, March 13th
BAC Report
Jennifer Strother, Bellevue College, BAC Rep
Treasurer’s Report
Given by Larry Clark for Karen Mottner. All colleges have paid this year’s dues and our current balance is $6,724.06.
SBCTC Updates – John Ginther, SBCTC
Power point presentation provided
Discussed current legislation that may impact colleges.
State Procurement and contract training – all modules converted to eLearning by April 24th.
Building and Innovative fund – please submit to State Treasurer monthly. Use recommended Transaction Codes TC 140 (1353/3205) to record receivable and accrued revenue. Use TC 142 (3205/1353 4310/3210) to record transfer to treasurer.
IPEDS. SBCTC provided total expenditures, but college must break out types of expenditures (salaries and wages, materials/services, operations and maintenance, etc.
Financial Statement Issues – state receivable, we need workgroups for IPEDS/Financial stmts, FS worksheet redesign, chartfields, checklist/notes changes, GASB changes, etc.
Permissible Uses of S&A Fees under Killian
Derek Edwards, Assistant Attorney General
Derek Edwards presented a short overview of the Killian outline. He reviewed what permissible and non-permissible uses of ASG funds are. He took many questions from the audience regarding admission fees, raffles, meals, etc. pertaining to student government activities.
Derek Edwards AAG: Appropriate spending for S&A funds. Killean Document
History, Admin at Grays Harbor created. Compilation of AAG advice over years.
It is a hodge-podge.
Permissive uses are not prescriptive. These are answers to questions over years.
Globally, S&A fees used for programs to support students--meant to be broadly defined. Once the students vote, they can generally use S&A fees. If it is an activity or program approved by ASG, then it is likely OK.
Gifting has been narrowed in its definition. Donative intent is used and since Students have paid S&A fees like dues they get something in return like subsidized childcare.
Can be used for costs of programs like staffing to provide student activities.
Portion may be state or locally funded.
If the students put on a dance and charge admissions fee and put this outside 522 fund. Why? Cannot use "seed" money--i.e. use state money to generate other money. If you can't have a mandatory fee for dance, can you have a donation fund? Of course. Students can assess a fee on themselves.
Technology fee can't be assessed, instead must be voted.
Can use voluntary fees to support national and statewide lobbying.
Religious clubs--Must fund. Can't not fund. This is based on 1st Ammendment.
Raffles and lotteries.Gambling Commissions states rules for some promotional drawings. For raffles, you need to be a 501C3.
Lotteries are unconstitutional--game of chance--give something of value to participate and get a prize. A supreme court case defined this. Reader's Digest lottery also got shut-down.
Raffles--If we want students to complete a survey and in return give away a prize, technically it is illegal.
Question: What is appropriate on S&A support for institutional support--like standing desks for library. What does tuition pay for? Classrooms, teachers, overhead.
UW tried to charge an energy fee that was shut-down.
Programs for students specifically--like childcare or athletics or some forms of financial aid can be funded--as a service to students.
S&A fees are appropriate for something that is outside what is required to be provided for higher education teaching & learning.
Wrap-Around services for example are required for higher education, and should be paid with state funds. List is available. . He will send to Larry to send out to BAR
Gifting: used to be aimed at railroads. Now there is a prohibition against gifting with an exception for Needy--poverty of students.
If funds are collected, Donative Intent is used for use of funds
For some uses, there is a good argument that students pay S&A fees and want services in return. If you have a program for Needy students that helps a broad range of students and is not specific to individuals, that might be an appropriate use of funds. If instead, financial aid is given to a specific individual, though, it would be impermissible.
For Need-based scholarships--truly at poverty level, any program should have review and approval by ASG processes.
Advisor's meals cam be paid by S&A? Yes, and you can also fund positions related to student programs out of S&A and therefore it is also logical to pay meals. This is for circumstances when employees are away from office and integral to meeting. Must be outside work station.Location. Not at workstation.
Student Meals ASG members are employees. So, if they attend, must have a Meals with Meetings form. Club members don't have these requirements. Apply fiscal standards with a guiding principal that we have Limited funds.
How do you define extra and co-curricular? State tuition and student activities.Would have to parse this.
Entertainment--should be aligned with club purpose. If funds for a particular club and activity is integral to the club's purpose, then costs would be appropriate.
If subsidizing activity with S&A funds, you can also use ticket sales to fund this activity. Note that seed money from state should not be used as well. This would be giving away state funds.
ORCA pass subsidy--a transportation program is OK. Trickier--what about students who don't pay S&A like ABE. Shoreline will be basing their orca subsidies on demonstrated need. Can put restrictions on this.
Gifting doesn't apply to Needy.
Put criteria on this based on a broad range of people.
Collaborative Budgeting
Jennifer Howard, EvCC VP of Admin Services
Power point presentation provided
Collaborative budgeting at EVCC basically is bottom up budgeting. Departments hold budget meetings and a draft budget comes from the department. Those budgets are shared with the campus as informational and to answer questions. Budgets are then sent through VPs and President for revisions and shared with campus again. The preliminary budget is then developed by the budget office and shared publicly with the board of trustees. Then budget is finalized.
Wrap Up & Adjourn
Next meeting is May 28-29 at Wall Walla Community College.