September 13, 2018
Cal Answers Financials and BAIRS Community,
Based on your feedback, rather than doing a phased shut-off we'll leave all the BAIRS dashboards open through December 21. On December 22, 2018 we will close down BAIRS and the system will no longer be accessible.
As we get closer to BAIRS retirement, please take this opportunity to use Cal Answers for all your reporting activities while BAIRS is still available to ensure you can find the information you need within the new dashboards.
Encumbrance and Procurement Card Reporting
We're pleased to announce that Encumbrance Reporting and the Procurement Card report are now available.
- Encumbrance Reporting is a new report tab within the General Ledger dashboard that tracks outstanding liabilities to suppliers awaiting payment. It will be especially useful to professionals who use BearBuy and/or BFS to close out purchase orders.
- Procurement Card is a new report tab within the Spend dashboard in the Procure to Pay subject area and tracks transactions that need to be cleared in BFS. It will be relevant to professionals who track procurement card purchases.
Training resources
- New reports
- General Ledger Reporting job aid: The updated General Ledger Reporting job aid now includes an overview of the new Encumbrance Reporting tab.
- Procurement Card job aid: The Procurement Card job aid provides an overview of the new Procurement Card report tab within the Spend dashboard in the Procure to Pay subject area.
- General Cal Answers
- Training materials: For those who are new to Cal Answers, visit the training page and review the Basic Navigation Learning Map on the Cal Answers website.
- Basic Navigation classes: Sign up for a Basic Navigation class on the Cal Answers training page to learn more about navigating Cal Answers Financials.
Access
We automatically grant Cal Answers Finance access to current BAIRS users who have access to the Financial Reports module; so if you have access to it in BAIRS you will be able to access it in Cal Answers Finance. Before you request access to Cal Answers Finance, please check to see whether you already have it. You can do this by logging into Cal Answers and looking for Financial Dashboards -> Finance on the Home page. You have access if you can open and run any of these dashboards.
Once you have access to Cal Answers Finance, we'll automatically grant you access to all the new dashboards that fall under Finance Access as they are released. Visit the Cal Answers Financials webpage to learn more about access and which dashboards are included in Finance Access.
If you do not already have access and need to request it, please follow these instructions. If you need to approve access, please follow these instructions
Alerts page
As a reminder, don't forget to check the alerts page regularly for timely updates about any known issues. You can find the alerts page by logging in to Cal Answers and clicking on the bright pink box on the right-hand side of the page.
Questions and feedback
- If you have questions about using Cal Answers, please contact the Cal Answers Help Desk at 664-9000 ( option 1, then option 2) or calanswers-help@berkeley.edu.
- Your feedback is welcome. If you would like to contact the project team, please email us at calanswersfinancials@berkeley.edu.
Thank you,
Cal Answers Financials Team
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Office of the Vice Chancellor of Finance