ctcLink Chart of Accounts Update

August 01, 2019 by ctcLink Communications

We are down to the last few milestones to fully implement the new Chart of Accounts (CoA)at the ctcLink FirstLink (pilot) colleges — Community Colleges of Spokane and Tacoma Community College — according to Emmett Folk, ctcLink Project Manager for Human Capital Management (HCM) and Finance (FIN).

The FirstLink college staff, SBCTC support, and ctcLink implementation teams have resolved known issues (those revealed during testing) and discovered new issues, some of which occurred after configuration changes were deployed and others which were untested business scenarios encountered in the production environment.

In the six weeks since the June 18 “Go” decision, the teams have navigated the following milestones:

Phase 1 baseline configuration deployments in the FIN Pillar (weekend of June 22-23)
Phase 2 configuration deployments in the FIN, HCM, and CS Pillars (weekend of June 29-30)
06B Payroll (AKA the last payroll under the old Chart of Accounts) confirm and post-confirm processing, including extra steps for HCM updates (during the July 4 holiday, July 3-5)
FY19 sub-ledger and General Ledger (closing on July 10)
Phase 3 configuration deployments in the FIN Pillar (evening of July 10)
Phase 3 configuration deployments for the HCM Pillar (July 11 and 12)
Phase 3 updates for Faculty Workload (weekend of July 13-14)
07A Payroll (first payroll under the new CoA) confirm on July 19
FY19 Adjustment Period 13 (closing on July 25)

The last major milestone for the new CoA deployment will be configuration of the FY19 Closing Rules in PeopleSoft and the execution of the “Request Ledger Close” process for FY19. This process is what creates the beginning balance entries for FY20 in PeopleSoft. A combination of the standard Closing Rule setup, the delivered “Request Ledger Close” process, and another custom bolt-on is what will allow the FirstLink colleges to close FY19 balances in the old CoA and open them in FY20 under the new CoA.

Emmett praised staff at both Tacoma Community College and the Community Colleges of Spokane for being incredibly patient and flexible while workarounds for issues were researched and changes deployed; even in the face of tight deadlines or with yet another deadline approaching.

“There is still work to be done, but incredible progress has been made so far,” Emmett said, “It’s the combined efforts of staff at Spokane, Tacoma, and SBCTC that have made this possible. Thank you all for the hard work throughout this entire process!”

Future deployment groups will not experience these same issues as they will not be operating with dual (old and new) Charts of Account.

Issues to be Resolved

Even with the unparalleled level of cooperation, there are still issues the teams are working to resolve, including two sets of outstanding issues in Billing/Accounts Receivable (AR) and General Ledger (GL), both of which were known and highlighted during the Go/No Go decision meeting:

Billing/AR

Posting errors generated by transactions with a mix of old CoA and new CoA values were highlighted during the Go/No decision process. We’re currently unit-testing a set of updated scripts to align these transactions to the new CoA and clear the posting errors. This will allow FY20 transactions currently stuck in these modules to get through their last step of processing.

General Ledger

While the errors in Billing and AR stop the transactions before they get to the General Ledger, every other module/pillar behaves a little differently. For example, when Accounts Payable or Payroll produce a similar kind of mixed old/new CoA transaction, it allows the transaction to post in the module sub-ledger and sends the mixed entries to the GL for posting there. In these cases, the transactions error out in GL where college staff are currently manually updating these GL Journal lines so all the entries align with the new CoA.

The milestone item here will be a bolt-on process that will look at these mixed old/new CoA GL Journals and programmatically update the old CoA lines to their new CoA equivalents, eliminating the need for the staff-performed manual updates.

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