Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Course Fee practices in CSE

As discussed at the November 2016 administrators meeting, the Dean's Office and a group of CSE administrators worked this fall on creating guidelines for course fee financial administration in CSE.  The Budget Office document linked below describes the pertinent details.

http://finance.umn.edu/assets/pdf/2016-09-23_Course_Fee_Guidelines.pdf

The details under "Accounting" (bottom of page 3) are described as recommended best practices, but in CSE this is the required approach.  During the annual spring fee request process, the Dean's Office will review fee requests expecting these guidelines to be followed.

To highlight some key points:

CSE follows the course fee guidance issued by central in the document titled:  Course Fee Guidelines.  Departments are expected to follow the practices detailed under "Accounting," including:

*  Each course that has a fee has a unique chartstring for each fee.

*  All fee income and corresponding allowable expenses associated with a fee are posted to that fee's unique chartstring.  (Transactions may be split across multiple chartstrings, so charges are reflected on appropriate chartstrings.)

*  Balances do not build up in course fee chartstrings.  (See Regents fee policy:  "Course fee rates shall be set to recover but not exceed actual costs.")

During the annual fee review and approval process, the Dean's Office will review course fee accounts for compliance with these guidelines and may request data from the previous three years.

Please let me know if you are administering course fees in a manner inconsistent with this approach, and you find that transition to this method will present problems.  DJP