Meet Your New UVAFinance Staff Senator: Myron Ballard

 

Earlier this month, Myron Ballard was elected by his UVAFinance colleagues to represent them in the UVA Staff Senate. In fact, this is the second time Myron has been elected (once before when he worked with the School of Engineering) and he is excited to continue serving his community. This is no small feat, and starting in August, Ballard will take on an important role in cultivating UVAFinance alongside the greater UVA community.

He reflected that the best thing about the Staff Senate was “working with a diverse group of persons across the university…and getting to know new people and partnering with people that just have this incredible wealth of knowledge.”

The Staff Senate is made up of over 60 senators who represent each department and school within the academic division of UVA. Their mission is to serve all staff through communication, partnerships, and advocacy in order to initiate positive change. These are values that Ballard carries in his every day. His current role as a project associate is very collaborative, meaning he often works with senior leadership. He builds bridges within UVAFinance to solve issues and intends to expand those skills when helping to resolve university-wide dilemmas.

He listens to the voices of the people, not just on his team, but throughout all of UVAFinance. Ballard plans to bring the concerns and opinions of all his colleagues across departments to the table within the Staff Senate. He loves providing excellent service in order to bring about real change and hopes to see people come together while satisfying the needs of stakeholders.

“I really want to get to know the different areas in Finance and bring them together and let them know that I’m here to serve you.” He adds, “I want to get people at Finance to realize that Staff Senate is a resource to help them resolve issues.”

In addition to his impressive roles, his undergrad and professional experience at UVA from the past decade has greatly inspired him in all aspects of his life. In his free time, Ballard is currently working on a science-fiction fantasy novel and a comic. He loves doing both traditional and digital art.

Congratulations again Myron!

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Related Content:   Staff Senate at UVA

Suggestions for a Successful Year End from the Workday Support Team

This time last year we were gearing up for Workday Financials to launch. We’ve learned a lot this first year in Workday Financials and as the first year comes to a close and we complete a full cycle, we’re really grateful for the way our finance community has collaborated with us to continually improve system processes.

As Fiscal Year End draws closer, here are a few suggestions from the Workday Support Team to help make this first Fiscal Year End close go smoothly and get the system back up as quickly as possible at the end of June:

• Review your Workday Inbox: at press time, there were several hundred business processes sitting in people’s inboxes that were over ten days old. Read more about this on the blog. If you find your Workday inbox overfloweth, the team recommends these Workday reports to help you identify what needs action:
• The “My Inbox” Report: this report lists everything in your inbox in columns and tells you what action needs to be taken on it.
• The “Account Certifications Awaiting Me” Report puts all your account certifications in one place and makes it easier to find them.
• Close Open Purchase Orders.
• Most importantly, close open purchase orders related to Grants. We reached out to Grant Managers with open POs with end dates prior to June 1, 2023 last week to alert them about this last week. Unsure if this relates to you? Check out this spreadsheet to see if a grant you manage is on the list, or just contact Ask Finance. We’ll automatically close these POs if we don’t hear from Grant Managers by June 20.
• For all other non-grant POs, we’d appreciate you closing any POs you don’t expect future invoice activity against. We don’t have the ability as we did in Oracle to auto-close these (although we’re working on that for the future). You can request the Clean Up Squad to handle this for you in batches – just contact us at Ask Finance to request this.
• Watch For Match Exceptions: If you have any of these, they need quick attention. They’ll come straight to your email inbox.
• And last but not least, as we get closer to the end of June, watch the Fiscal Year End Close Dates. They’ll be coming more regularly as we approach June 30. Keep track of what’s due!

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Related Content: Closing POs: An Important Fiscal Year-End Task

Closing POs: An Important Fiscal Year End Task

As Fiscal Year End approaches, don't forget to close your POs.  Workday Financials does not have an auto-close feature like Oracle did (we'll be working on that, though, in the future).  

We understand it may not be possible to get everything closed before year-end, so here are some priorities and guidelines: 

• POs associated with grants will be automatically closed unless you tell us to roll them over, so review your open grant-related POs with end dates before June 1, 2023, and let Ask Finance know if you are expecting extensions and if any of them should be rolled over by June 20.  
• Any non-grant POs you don't expect future invoice activity against, please close! See this link for a quick reference guide on how to perform this action.  If you need some assistance closing POs, the Clean Up Squad might be able to help!  Contact the Ask Finance Team to inquire.  
• There's a new report in Workday called "Open Purchase Orders - Fully Invoiced and Paid" that you can use to help identify your Workday POs and see what can be closed. 
• Note that Closing a PO isn't the same as Cancelling a PO.  Closing a PO happens when the entire process of procurement, from request to final delivery, has been completed and no further action is required.  Canceling a purchase order involves the termination of the order before it is completed or fulfilled.  This action is taken when requirements change or there is a decision to discontinue the purchase.  A canceled PO is null and void.  Procurement shoppers can close POs, but PO cancellation requests must be submitted to AskFinance@virginia.edu.  

For more details on closing POs, check out Joel Kreider's slides from our June Fiscal Administrator's meeting on the UVAFinance website.  

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Related content:  Suggestions for a Successful Year End from the Workday Support Team

Continuous Improvement Led by You: Account Certification

Once Workday Financials went live, that wasn't all for collaboration between UVAFinance and our finance partners across Grounds.  We've continued to collaborate in the spirit of continuous improvement to make processes better and share best practices.  Case in point is everyone's favorite, account certification.  

Although Workday Financials is a cloud-based system that we share with lots of other entities (meaning we can't customize it like we were used to doing with Oracle), there are still lots of things we can do to make it work better for us.  This spring, a working group from the School of Medicine partnered with UVAFinance's Workday Support Team and Change Enablement Groups got together and identified several pain points and figured out what pains could be alleviated now and what we could put on track to fix in the near future.  

You can see the full results of the working group's efforts in the Workday Support Team's presentation slides here, as well as in the School of Medicine presentation slides here, but here are the results you can enjoy NOW that are a result of this working group's efforts: 

• A new report, “Account Certifications Awaiting Me – Detailed” has been added to the Account Certification Actions dashboard.  This report has been added to provide greater insight into the Account Certifications awaiting a Preparer or Approver to potentially help prioritize their work and/or provide information not previously available in the original “Account Certifications Awaiting Me” report.
• Select View More at the bottom of the "Account Certifications Awaiting Me – Detailed" report on the Account Certification Actions Dashboard to 
• See full list of Account Certifications (the report on the dashboard shows 100 lines). 
• Make selections to help prioritize the Account Certifications. 
• Selections made on the prompt screen will persist after refreshing your browser.
• The “Details for Account Certification Report” is now sorted by Ledger Account, which matches the Account Certification user interface which lists the balances in order by Ledger Account number.  
• Attachments from various business processes are now surfaced in the Details for Account Certification report, eliminating the need to drill further into the BP details for find/review them. 
• Additional Prompts have been added to the Status of Account Certifications report to improve reporting capabilities.
• Once an Account Certification has been created and assigned to an employee, the only way for another employee to take action on that Account Certification is to request the Account Certification business process be reassigned. To facilitate streamlined requests, a template has been added to the Workday Account Certification UBI QlikSense module.
• A step has been added to the month-end closing process to run MFS a final time.  This will mitigate balances remaining on the Project’s Default Fund (e.g., FD068 Operating Project Default) from any activity posted on the final business day of the month.  The remaining balances caused reconciling differences that Project Budget Specialists/Project Budget Managers had to monitor the next month to ensure they cleared out.

And there's more on the way!  Check out the presentation slides for planned upgrades or just watch the blog to see additional improvements as they roll out. 

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Want to know more about UVAFinance and Continuous Improvement?  Head on over to the UVAFinance CI page.

 

Ask Finance & Ask HR: Working Together on Your Payroll Questions

This July, the Finance Solution Center will take over payroll inquiries from the HR Solution Center.  As you might imagine, payroll falls into a grey area between finance and HR.  

Generally speaking, if it's a money question (things like the numbers on your pay slip, your W2, your W4, etc.), it's a finance question, and if it's a benefits matter (things like insurance and PTO), it's an HR question.  

The good news is, you don't have to worry about going to the right Solution Center.  Ask Finance and Ask HR will work together behind the scenes to get your query to the right person no matter what!

The Great Clean Up: Progress as of June 14

As Fiscal Year-End draws nigh, the Clean-Up Squad is burning through a mountain of transactions to make sure things go as smoothly as possible!  

Note especially the close Purchase Orders -- these are just individually closed POs.  We've mass closed about 75,000.  If you need the Clean-Up Squad's help closing POs ahead of Fiscal Year-End, email us at askfinance@virginia.edu  

Here's what things are looking like as of June 14:

Task Behavior	Count
Adjust Accounting	5,480
Assign Costing Allocation	1,614
Cancel Accounting Adjustment	25
Cancel Change Order	35
Cancel Purchase Order	6
Change Internal Service Delivery	831
Close Purchase Order	1,405
Create Change Order	391
Create Journal	245
Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments	885
Edit Accounting Adjustment	10
Edit Change Order	6
Mass Close Procurement Documents	94
Revise Accounting Adjustment	237
Revise Change Order	42
Revise Costing Allocation Assignment	35
Revise Internal Service Delivery	829
Revise Payroll Accounting Adjustments	168
Total	12,338

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Related content: Closing POs:  An Important Fiscal Year-End Task

Finance Welcomes Dan Hoogenboom back to UVA

The Hoogenbooms

Early this May, Dan Hoogenboom re-joined the University as a project manager in UVAFinance, bringing experience gained from stints in both engineering consulting and community/economic development planning. Sandwiched in between those positions was his previous time at UVA, in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he was a fiscal administrator.

Hoogenboom’s work experience managing projects, people, finances, and above all, the needs of various stakeholder groups, makes him a great fit for his new position within UVAFinance.

“I was drawn to this position because of my previous experience with the University and because I’m committed to continuous improvement,” he says, adding, “it’s exciting to take on projects from start to finish and see how it can positively affect everyone on our team.”

Hoogenboom is a 2013 graduate of Virginia Tech, with a BA in Public and Urban Affairs. After originally pursuing a career in urban design, he found that what he most enjoyed was opportunities to work collaboratively with people from different backgrounds and interests toward a common goal, and a return to higher education was a happy byproduct of this realization.

Hoogenboom and his wife Caroline are expecting baby #2 in July; their two-year-old son Nate is eagerly awaiting becoming a big brother (no word on what the family’s three cats think of another small Hoogenboom). They enjoy traveling both in the States and internationally (they’ve been to Europe and Africa, to name a few places), and spending a lot of time outside. Hoogenboom also enjoys college sports and playing golf.

Year-End Adjustments: What to Expect

After we close the books on this fiscal year, there will be a brief period when adjustments can be made in order to address budget deficits.  Departments can perform these transactions between July 1 and July 14.  

Here are a few guidelines to follow:

• Transfers should be the primary activity being performed.
• Do not change the fund source.
• All transactions will be routed to central finance for approval.
• Accruals should not be initiated within departments.
• Activity during this two-week time frame will not be seen in FY24 balances until August 1

Questions or concerns?  Please contact us at askfinance@virginia.edu. 

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Don't miss any Fiscal Year-End Close Dates - check out the calendar of dates on the UVAFinance website. 

Graduation Celebration with the UVAFinance Team

UVAFinance is celebrating the season of graduation with our team members who have graduated or had close family members graduating this year.  Head over to our Flickr album to see this year's shiny new Class of 2023 photos.  

Congratulations, we're so proud of you!

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Related Content:  Inspiring Positive Change: UVAFinance's Ann Criser-Shedd

Did You See This? Reporting & Analytics Updates

The May 22 Finance Reporting and Analytics Release Notes have been posted to the UVAFinance website.  Check out the full release notes on the website.  

The release notes featured some great new reports, including these new Account Certification Reports: 

• Account Certification Awaiting Me: New Prompts and Data Fields (this one is especially handy for Fiscal Year End)
• Status of Account Certifications: New Prompts and Data Fields
• Details for Account Certifications: Now includes attachments to streamline the review and approval process (just hover your mouse over the attachment, then click the … > Attachment > View)

Since the release notes, the team has also added this new report:   

Open Purchase Orders, Fully Invoiced & Paid:  this report helps you find your own POs created in Workday so you can more easily close out your own POs during the Fiscal Year End.

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Related Content:  Account Certification has received some process improvements thanks to a working group featuring our friends at SOM and some UVAFinance partners.  Read more about it on the blog.  

Celebrating a Shrinking Invoice Backlog

An update from Amanda Lockhart Davis

On April 24, UVAFinance brought invoice processing in-house to deal with the invoice backlog and to better serve you, our internal finance partners, and of course, our vendors.  With the addition of a fantastic team of temps working with our already-wonderful AP team, we've been steadily hacking away at that backlog while also taking care of the new invoices coming in, and today, I'm pleased to share these amazing numbers with you. 

• In Jaggaer, we have only 24 total pending invoices (11 of which are past-due).
• In Workday, there are 466 draft invoices and 396 past-due invoices.
• As for new invoices, we are currently processing invoices that are only 36 hours old.  

On June 14, the team got together to celebrate
their success with sparkling cider and good cheer!
See the rest of the pictures on UVAFinance's Flickr

I'm writing this on Wednesday the 14th, and honestly, by the time you read this, the backlog may be totally gone.  I'm so proud of what this team has done to remove such a large pain point for those we serve.  Moving from nearly 4500 invoices in April to where we are now is a testament to their diligence and focus.  

We will continue to work on other issues we know are on your mind.  We look forward to your continued partnership in the future!

Inspiring Positive Change: UVAFinance's Ann Criser-Shedd

When opportunity knocks, you can count on Ann Criser-Shedd to answer the door.

For three years, beginning in 2009, Criser-Shedd worked at the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce, serving as an executive assistant to the President and CEO. One of the first people she met in that role was UVA’s Leonard Sandridge. During one of their frequent conversations, Sandridge shared some encouraging advice with Criser-Shedd: “Get a degree; it will change your life.”

It didn’t take her long to act on that advice, and she hasn’t stopped taking significant steps and seizing opportunities since then.

After getting her bachelor’s degree in 2014 from JMU in Public Relations/HR Management, Criser-Shedd started in Payroll at UVA as a temporary employee. She quickly became a full-time employee, progressing to a payroll specialist and then a senior specialist. During that time, Criser-Shedd saw many changes, including payroll transitioning from human resources to central finance, as well as the transitions to Workday HCM and Workday Financials. She also earned her functional payroll certifications and found time to fundraise for her local YMCA.

And then her alma mater started sending her emails about their MBA program. JMU’s MBA program is a hybrid model (online but in person every third week), allowing students to work and go to school and finish in two years. After gathering her letters of recommendation and finding out her resume and experience meant she wouldn’t need to take the GMAT, Criser-Shedd was well on her way.

During the graduate program, Criser-Shedd took four graduate-level classes every semester and then an international immersion class for ten days during her final spring semester. The international immersion class gave the students global experience via business visits to nonprofits, consulting, and management firms in Argentina and Chile. She stayed with the same cohort the entire time, and that core group of students had a diverse background and an average work experience of 8-10 years.

Since her graduation this May, Criser-Shedd is now a “Double Duke” as well as a member of Omicron Delta Kappa based on her excellent GPA. What’s next for her? Just you wait (something tells us you won’t have to wait long!).

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Related Content:  Celebrating Graduation with the UVAFinance Team 

Petty Cash Replenishment Process

Are you a petty cash custodian?  When submitting petty cash and checking replenishment, receipts should be assigned to the appropriate spend categories as individual lines and not to the petty cash spend category.

 
The petty cash spend category is only used to create and increase petty funds, not for replenishments. We will be correcting replenishments that have been previously submitted to the Petty Cash spend category in error, and then locking the petty cash spend category for Central use only to avoid confusion in the future.

Please see this Quick Reference Guide for more information.

Feel free to reach out to askfinance@virginia.edu if you have questions or concerns.

Wellness Resources: June 2023

Take a free Virginia Recreation class

IM-Rec is now Virginia Recreation! Join a free group fitness class this spring-summer. Classes include Cycling, Yoga, Body Pump and Pilates.

Classes run through July 28, 2023. Click HERE to view the schedule.


Classes

Grow Through Stress: How to See Stressors as an Opportunity
June 8, 3:30 PM  Presented by FEAP

See all of FEAP's past events as well as their virtual library on their website.

Temporary Rollback of Two-Approver Expense Report Change

As you may know, we changed the expense report approval routing on May 22 to require two unique approval steps. This involved adding alternate routing to Cost Center managers, Senior Department Finance Approvers’ supervisors, and others not previously required to approve expense reports.

While we completed significant testing of multiple scenarios before moving forward with these changes, we have received feedback that the Cost Center manager step, specifically, was causing concern as ALL approvers in that role were being required to approve, which created a domino effect and did not allow those same approvers to approve at P2P, Senior Department Finance Approver, or other steps. We are working to redesign this process to better align with UVA policy, but it will take some time.

We have decided to roll back this change entirely for now. Expense reports will route as they did before the May 22 change. After fiscal year-end, we will reevaluate and work on a better business process to meet our internal controls requirement of two unique approval steps and make things as simple for our end users as possible.

We apologize for the confusion this has caused over the past two weeks and hope this reversion to the original business process will help.

A couple of items to note:

• 
  
  Expense reports already in process will follow the business process in place at the time reports were submitted, so you may still see extra approvers until all reports submitted since May 22 work themselves through the system.
• We would still like for you to review your roles to ensure different people are in each role so when a new change is implemented later this summer, there will be two unique approvers without having to route for alternate approval.
  

Please email askfinance@virginia.edu with any questions.