Finance Glossary

Accounting and Reporting at Columbia, our new finance system that will go-live in July, 2012.

Enables you to control commitments and expenditures automatically by checking them against predefined, authorized budgets.

A valid ChartField combination in the system.

Purchasing Office backend purchase order system - interacts with FFE Purchasing Requisition Module.

A list of all General Ledger (GL) accounts used by one or several University codes. For each GL account, the chart of accounts contains the account number, account name, and the information that controls how an account functions and how a GL account is created in a University code.

Chart of Accounts

Functionality in PeopleSoft that enables us to manage expenditures actively against predefined, authorized budgets

Ability to change an employee’s account distribution retroactively in PAC. Also refers to the retroactive transfer of expenditures from one account to another.

Columbia University Biomedical and Health Information Services.

Columbia University Human Resources.

Columbia University Medical Center.

Departmental Authorization Form - used to create a financial authorization profile for qualified administrators.

A box that appears on screen that asks the user for input, or relays information to the user.

(also known as DWH):  Data Warehouse - section of My.Columbia portal that houses various reporting mechanisms.

(employee ID): Unique identification code for an individual associated with the University.

Enterprise Resource Planning Systems:  A single, integrated business solution that works across an entire organization. The primary elements of the solution are multiple software applications, or modules, that provide specialized functionality within a single, integrated operating environment that makes use of data in a database that is shared among the modules. At Columbia University, the Finance business area is the focus of our ERP effort.

Facilities and Administration: also referred to as Indirect Cost (IC), Indirect Cost Recovery (ICR), and overhead.  F&A are actual costs incurred to conduct normal business activities, but are not readily identified with or directly changed to a specific project or program.

Financial Data Store, our new financial data warehouse.  (Previously referred to as ODS --Operational Data Store).

An area on a page that displays or requires data.

Financial Systems section of My.Columbia Portal - certain FFE modules are found there.

Comprehensive descriptions of what a specified software package will do, how it is expected to perform, and its intended purpose as it relates to the specified business needs (Finance) of the University.

General Ledger: The ‘Book of Record’ which holds all financial transactions in detail or summary and is used for financial reporting and financial management.

Human Resources Processing Center.

Inter Departmental Invoice - used by CU departments who need to charge other CU departments for services rendered.

Journal Entry - mechanism for transferring funds between FAS accounts.

A process or practice that is considered to be highly efficient or effective and has been adopted by a large number of organizations.

Groupings of software programs that collectively support a specific business function.

Old Fiscal Year.

University Purchasing Card.

Payroll Accounting Distribution - breakdown of personnel salary costs as charged across FAS accounts.

Payroll Account Transfer form - used to accomplish payroll specific accounting entries.

University Central Purchase Order.

First (highest) level at which you can budget and record project activity.

A system record of goods received from purchase orders.

A named set of work that a user can do.  A role is associated with one or more permission lists that authorize access to particular system functions to accomplish the work implied by the role.

A test environment that allows experimentation with system elements without affecting production data. For example, a sandbox might be used to test a new system module or module interface.

The assignment of user roles and other user-specific settings to the employees who will use ARC, FDS (Financial Data Store) and PAC.  These assignments define the functions, screens, and data available to each user when working in these systems.

Standard Industry Code - used to identify types of payments in AP systems.

Subject Matter Expert:  A person who is an expert in a particular business area.

Sponsored Projects Finance (formerly Restricted Funds).

(aka T&E):  Travel and Business Expense Report.

A PeopleSoft graphical format that organizes ChartField data into hierarchies which can be used for security, reporting and managing organizational structure.

University-wide Purchasing Agreements are those supplier relationships for products and/or services that have cost, terms and other business elements negotiated by the Purchasing Office.

The Foxpro version of FFE (old version) accessed by downloading entry point software.

The automated to-do list created by workflow. From the worklist, you can directly access the pages you need to perform the next action, and then return to the worklist for another item.