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Banner Finance Plain and Simple – Control your roll with FGAYRLM
created in Banner Finance
It’s that time of year again when all through the house, not a creature is stirring, just the auditors. And finance departments determine who has been naughty and who has been nice! Yes, that’s right. It’s Year End time and we thought we would post something seasonal.
FGAYRLM is the Banner form where you schedule and control the 4 primary Banner-delivered Year End roll processes (i.e. FGRGLRL, FGRENRL, FGRBDRL, FGRCLOP ). All 4 of these processes can be submitted (in the order of the list provided) via Banner Job submission (GJAPCTL). Before you do that, there are a number of configuration screens to complete to customize the rolls for your institution but this article is not about the rolls specifically. It’s about FGAYRLM. Note: there is another roll process related to labor encumbrances (FGRLENC) for those BANNER Finance shops using the multi-year encumbrance enhancement.
FGAYRLM is the form that you need to configure so that your rolls will actually work when you submit them. You will need to use this form to configure/schedule your Year End roll procedures for the fiscal year that you are about to close. For each roll, you need to concern yourself with the following parameters:
Starting Document Number – This is the starting document number that will be assigned to the transactions (journals). This number will be used as the first document number for transactions created by that specific roll procedure and incremented by one each time the document reaches its limit of 9,990 transactions. The last 4 characters (at least) must be numeric for obvious reasons. A strong naming convention is important so that it means something to you and your clients.
Ending Document Number – This is the ending document number associated with the roll. This field will be automatically populated by the appropriate roll procedure as part of running it. Hint: Sometimes the Encumbrance Roll (FGRENRL) accounts for an extra document but when you look, there are no transactions for that document. No real harm done and you can ask your IT staff to move it back one if you like.
Scheduled Date – This is the earliest date that you would like the specific roll to run. If, say while testing, in a testing instance, you try and run the specific roll before this scheduled date, the roll will fail. You can run the roll at any time equal to or greater than the scheduled date.
Performed Date – This is the date that the process actually ran and is populated automatically by the appropriate roll procedure as part of running it. You will not be able to run the roll a second time (by accident) if this date is set so there is a bit of protection here.
Each of the roll procedures offer the option to run in (A)udit mode (where reports are produced and the database tables are NOT updated) or (U)pdate mode (where reports are produced and the database tables ARE updated).
I’d like to draw your attention to a very important detail that will help you to understand and better manage your Grant related funds. If you are running the Budget Carry Forward roll (FGRBDRL) for your grant funds (i.e. Funds that have been associated to a Grant code in FRAGRNT), you do not want these carry forward records to negatively impact your Inception to Date balances on the Grant Ledger (FRRGRNL). Banner is aware of that, and will NOT post any transactions to the Grant Ledger where the document number is included in the document range that was used for the Budget Carry Forward roll procedure (FGRBDRL). These transactions will continue to post to the Operating Ledger/Income Statement (FGBOPAL) which will manage the Budget Availability data should you depend heavily on that. Again, every institution is different and the idea is to use the power of these Banner features to help you.
What is recommended, then, is to extend the Ending Document Number for the Budget Carry Forward roll to the end of its natural series. This way, if someone in your Grants area want to manually post a carry forward transaction to a grant related fund, then they can use one of the next unused “reserved” document numbers from that document range without fear of destroying the Inception to Date accounting in the Grants Ledger. As an example, I set the Starting Document Number for the Budget Carry Forward roll to CF140001 for the fiscal year 14 just about to close. Let’s say that the process ends up using 100 documents and sets the Ending Document Number accordingly to CF140100. With the help of our IT staff, we change the Ending Document Number to CF149999 and let the nice people in the grants office know that they can use range of document numbers CF140101-CF149999 (incl.) to post journals to fiscal year 15 which will not alter the Grant Ledger Inception to Date balance. NICE!
For more on the Banner Year End processes and the role FGAYRLM plays within them, please refer to:
Banner Finance User Guide (Release 8.9 – September 2013) Chapter 2 – Processing (pp. 2-72 – 2-79 (incl.))