Accounting Services Section (ACT)
POLICY 1
Effective Date: 07/01/1996
Last Modified Date: 02/10/1996
General Description
The Financial Records System (FRS) is an integrated general and subsidiary ledger record keeping and reporting system. The system is designed to provide both the features of a budgetary control system (management information) and a fund accounting system (stewardship information). The system complies with the guidelines of both the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).
System Features
This system is highly flexible with a variety of techniques which will allow all levels of management and operations access to timely financial information. In brief the techniques and features of FRS:
- allow budgeting of revenues and expenditures on any of four different levels of aggregation (all four may be used within the same account);
- permit automatic reallocation of expenditure budgets (ABR) within an account;
- provide for reporting on a state year, quarterly, federal year and project year basis;
- provide for the comparison of actual expenditures against budget;
- produce a variety of financial reports, such as detailed reports for the lowest level of operations and summaries for the upper levels of management;
- produce income and expense statements and balance sheets;
- use "roll-up" reporting techniques in which numerous subsidiary ledger accounts can be summarized into one report for management analysis;
- provide for special reports through a variety of report generating techniques;
- produce detailed and summary information on encumbrances;
- provide for the detailed classification of both expenditures and revenue;
- provide for automatic linkage between the general ledger and subsidiary ledger which assures that the system will always be in balance and provides for simplified data entry into the system;
- provide for control of cash ownership by funds (general ledger account) and automatically maintains book cash balances for each bank account;
- provide for a number of automatically generated journal entries at month-end such as prorates, indirect cost calculations, and so on;
- maintain current year data on budgets and actual expenditures, past year data on actual expenditures, and budgets for a future year, permitting a three year comparison on an easy and convenient basis;
- provide automated controls and edit routines to increase greatly the accuracy of data within the system;
- provide the capability to process daily updates which simplifies error location and correction, account reconciliation and work scheduling, while also permitting the data files to be in a current reportable state at all times.
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