As many districts we work with use Finance Manager’s nVision program as their financial application system, we reached out to our contacts there to provide some of the features that can help with new school year and year-end processes. Below are some highlights they shared.
Accounting
Within the Accounting module there is a Year End Processing section containing utilities that you may find very useful. Below is a brief description of the available utilities.
Outstanding Purchase Order Processing
This utility allows you to process your remaining outstanding purchase orders for the fiscal year while making the proper ledger adjustments. Whether you are carrying the purchase orders forward to the next fiscal year, creating a liability to carry forward or liquidating them, this utility allows you to process them with a click of a button doing one or multiple at a time. Within the utility, the user can filter and sort the screen according to their preferences, along with being able to export the list to Excel for further analysis.
Unroll Purchase Orders
This utility can be used to reverse the rollover of a PO. If you mistakenly roll a purchase order over for any reason, this utility can undo or remove the rollover transaction in the new fiscal year by allowing you to pull it back into the outstanding purchase order processing utility.
Automatic Closing Entries
A series of journal entries for each fund must be made at the end of the fiscal year to close out the general ledger control accounts that balance out to the subsidiary ledger revenue and appropriation account balances including Revenues, Expenditures, Appropriations, Estimated Revenues and Encumbrances. This utility will automatically create these entries by fund based on the general ledger codes setup on each fund.
Carry Forward GL Balances
Once the general ledger has been closed out and finalized, the remaining open balances will need to be entered into the new year as opening balances. This utility can be used to automate the entry by fund.
Carry Forward Special Funds
Capital and federal grants do not always follow the same date range as the standard fiscal year school districts in New York State follow, July 1st through June 30th. Therefore, we have a designation on the setup of a fund to indicate that it is a multi-year fund and will not follow the same date range as the fiscal year. To transition these funds over the fiscal year end without having to enter an opening budget entry for the available balances, this utility can be used to carry those available balances over. This enables the user to run financial and/or transaction reports on the accounts in the fund for the length of a project without having an opening budget entry on 07/01 inflating the available balance on the report.
Payroll
Payroll is another department that is tasked with rolling over to the new fiscal year and nVision has multiple features to assist you. Here is a summary of the available features within nVision designed to streamline these processes needed to prepare the system to begin paying employees for the first payrolls of the new year.
Negotiations Module
First and foremost, this module is specifically designed to project, review and rollover salaries into upcoming fiscal years. A district can forecast salaries based on current payroll data out five years. They can also progress employees through a salary matrix or apply flat dollar and/or percentage increases. Additionally, this module can be used to recalibrate positions and earnings based on changes in standard workdays, standard hours per day, full time equivalent percentage changes and number of pay periods. There are numerous different scenarios that may come up at a district when contracts change and nVision’s Negotiations module can be used to conduct a bulk review and update of your employees’ earnings.
Special Deduction Menu
A collection of utilities designed to maintain employee deductions. Here you can find a utility to activate/inactivate a deduction, change amounts or limits, and update deduction frequencies. There is also a utility to update deductions for multiple employees in a spreadsheet type form when a manual change is required instead of visiting individual employees’ screens.
Payroll Event Setup
This utility was introduced this summer in our latest release as a time-saver. Every year, the payroll calendar (or as it is called within nVision – the pay schedule) must be set up for each individual pay profile for the new fiscal year. Using this utility, you can conduct an update to all the pay profiles who share the same pay schedule by assigning the payroll dates and pay period dates for each payroll all at once instead of visiting each individual pay profile.
Timesheet Earning Maintenance Utility
Throughout the fiscal year, payroll will pay employees through nVision’s timesheet entry screen. These timesheet entries get saved in the employees’ payroll information record in order to be used in the timesheet entry area for future payrolls. This utility is designed to help maintain these timesheet records. Whether changing rates, accounts, earning codes or active status this utility can be used to update multiple records all at once.
For a more detailed overview on how to use these utilities, you can find our fiscal year end accounting procedures webinar along with the supporting documentation on our website, www.financemgr.com, within the Support Services section. Also, visit our website to learn more about other products including Timepiece and OptiGate, or call 631-941-1313.
Jeremy Radigan, Application Support Specialist
Lauren Esposito, Marketing Coordinator