RRC Meeting Summary -September
19, 2012
Biennial Budget
Request: The President announced
that if the legislature provides $14.2 million in incremental funding each year
of the next biennium, then the U will hold Minnesota resident undergraduate
tuition flat for both years of the biennium.
The freeze does not necessarily apply to graduate and professional
students or non-resident undergraduates.
The current budget framework also models a tentative 2.5%
average pay increase in each of the next two fiscal years, which is subject to
collective bargaining and changing fiscal conditions. The framework also includes a retrenchment
(AKA: a cut) to collegiate O&M allocations, but it is far too early and
there are too many moving pieces to guess at the ultimate magnitude of the
retrenchment to CSE.
Payroll Default
Chartstrings: Please see the
attached document regarding Deptid level payroll default chartstrings. This is a very important change that is
effective Oct. 3, but the document is clear and concise so I will not restate
it here. The Dean's Office will monitor
departmental default chartstrings.
Expanded Program
Code: Central has implemented
expanded usage of the Program code to give departments more flexibility in
managing chartstrings. CSE "owns" the entire
range of Program codes that begin with "SE."
The remaining three characters of new Program codes are at our
discretion. For example, we could create
program SEGK4 to be virtually whatever we want (with an appropriately assigned
Function value) in order to avoid using optional chartfields.
The only requirements from central are that you cannot
duplicate Fund, Deptid, or Account with a new Program. This means you cannot create a Program for
"Office Supplies," because that is already reflected in the Account. You can, however, "duplicate" the purposes of
existing Program codes and create person-specific Program codes. You could, for example, create a program code
for Prof. Smith's startup fund. The college
will not mandate anything with this new functionality. It is up to departments to use or not use it
as you see fit.
The primary benefits of new Programs are to avoid errors in
the optional chartfields and leverage EFS's ability to budget check the
Fund-Deptid-Program. It also results in
shorter chartstrings that can be committed to memory (Fund-Deptid-Program is
virtually the same length as Fund-Area-Org).
The downsides of creating new Programs are the transitional effort and
you lose the ability to easily run a roll-up report on a generic Program code.
We will have a discussion of this at the next administrators
meeting.
