FAS Gargoyle
 
FAS User's Manual
Table of Contents
 

 

Accounts 

An account is a financial entity established to record transactions for a particular purpose or function. It has a single source of funds. A primary individual, known as Account Administrator #1, is responsible for monitoring the account. 

At the University, there are over 16,000 accounts in the subsidiary ledgers and about 10,000 accounts in the general ledger

Each account has certain characteristics. For example, each account belongs to a specific department; it is managed by a specific individual; and its budget may be available only until a certain date. These characteristics are called attributes. On average, more than forty attributes of each account are stored in the computer, and they allow accounts to be grouped together for certain reporting purposes. For instance, all the accounts belonging to a single department or to a single administrator can be identified and reported together by their common attributes. All grants from a certain agency can be pulled together as can all grants from the agency that expire at the end of a certain month. 

Accounts that are budgeted on a fiscal year basis are "closed" on June 30; except for corrections, transactions processed after this date are applied to the following year’s accounts. Accounts such as grants or contracts typically extend beyond the University’s fiscal year, and, for these accounts, June 30 is just another month end, so balances and budgets are not closed out. These accounts are reported as project accounts, and the AM090 (Account Statement in Whole Dollars) indicates spending for the entire project period rather than simply for the fiscal year. 

Any transaction entering FAS must be made up of the six-digit account number and the four-digit subaccount or account control. For example, 4–43251–5500 or 0–23452–1361 are legitimate codings. Transactions with entry codes 3X, 4X or 6X having less than ten digits or having ten digits which fail to satisfy system edits will be posted to the appropriate suspense account. Invalid entry code 0X,1X, 2X, 5X, and 9X transactions will be rejected. 

This testing of account numbers is done through the global subcode edit table, which is the definitive list of valid account codings in FAS. 
 


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