Financial transactions appear on CU's Financial Statements via a process called journal entry. All subsystems feed transactions to the Financial Statements as journals. Examples of subsystem feeds are accounts payable, purchasing, student billing and receivables, printing services transactions, information systems transactions, etc.
There are different types of journal entries in the Finance System menu box:
- Actual Journal Entries
- Journal Entries
- Gift Fund Journal Entries
- Cash Transfer Journal Entries
- Payroll Expense Transfer Journal Entries*
- Budget Journal Entries
- Encumbrance Journal Entries
Actual Journal Entries
When actual financial transactions need to be recorded and cannot be recorded through a subsystem feed, they are processed as an “Actual” journal entry. The most common reasons for actual journal entry processing at the campus departmental level are:
- Recording of IN (Interdepartmental) revenue and expense
- Making corrections to financial transactions on a speedtype
- Recording activity in accordance with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) such as accruals for accounts receivables and revenue, allowance for bad debts and bad debt expense, inventory adjustments, etc.
Actual journal entries must be balanced between debits and credits.
Budget Journal Entries
Budgets are recorded or adjusted by entering transactions into one of the Finance System budget ledgers:
- B_INI_CONT (Budget Initial Continuing)
- B_INI_TEMP (Budget Intital Temporary)
- B_CUR_CONT (Budget Current Continuing)
- B_CUR_TEMP (Budget Current Temporary)
The INITIAL budget ledgers, B_INI_CONT and B_INI_TEMP, are entered by Budget Office staff. At the beginning of each fiscal year, the Budget Office records the initial budget for speedtypes within the General Fund (fund 10), Auxiliary Funds (funds 20-29), and Renewal/Replacement Funds (funds 71-72) using the appropriate INITIAL ledger. Fund 30 budgets are input by the sponsored projects staff (DSPA at DDC and OGC at AMC).
The CURRENT budget ledgers are available to certain Finance System users having the proper security authorization. The CURRENT ledgers are used throughout the fiscal year for making budget adjustments.
The distinction between Continuing and Temporary budget ledgers relates to carryover from one fiscal year to the next. Each year at fiscal year end, budgets recorded in the B_INI_CONT and B_CUR_CONT ledgers will roll forward from one fiscal year to the next, while budgets recorded in the B_INI_TEMP and the B_CUR_TEMP ledgers will not roll forward.
Budget journal entries are single-line entries and are not balanced between debits and credits.
Encumbrance Journal Entries
Encumbrance journal entries are created automatically through several university processes such as procurement and human resources management processes. Occasionally, departments may wish to encumber certain expense amounts on speedtypes; they would perform an encumbrance journal entry to do so.
Encumbrance journal entries are single-line entries and are not balanced between debits and credits.
*Payroll expense transfer journal (PET) entries are created in the Human Resources Management System. The Finance Practice database lists a Payroll Expenses Transfer journal entry function which is used in very limited cases to correct payroll that was charged prior to April, 2003. For more information on the PET process, see: the HRMS Step-by-Step Guides.
