Encumbrances

Overview

The Encumbrances report displays encumbrance details, including Encumbrance Amount, Purchase Order Number and Journal ID, for tracing purchasing activities back to the BearBuy and BFS source systems.

This report is useful for financial services, business services, and procurement professionals who use BearBuy and/or BFS to close out purchase orders. Answer questions such as:

  • What are the encumbrances within my unit, fund, CF1, or CF2?
  • What is the remaining encumbrance on a PO?

The Encumbrance Amount drill down functionality opens the Purchase Order Summary on the Operations dashboard, which shows all transactions that have posted for the PO as sourced from BFS. Keep in mind it is for the specific combination of columns that was drilled on. For example, if a PO was split across multiple chartstrings, and you clicked on the Encumbrance Amount for one particular chartstring, the transaction history you see is for that chartstring and not the whole PO.

Unlike the other GLR reports, the Encumbrances report shows all open POs since BearBuy was implemented.

Report

Report Views

  • By Chartstring: Data is sorted by Chartstring
  • By Purchase Order: Data is sorted by Purchase Order
  • You can move columns or change the sort order of data within a column. In this report, you cannot include or exclude columns.

Drill Across

Click on a Purchase Order Number link to drill across to the Cal Answers Procure to Pay subject area Operations dashboard - Purchase Order Summary report to see the data as sourced from BearBuy. You can cross reference this with Encumbrance Reporting, where the data is sourced from BFS.

From the Operations dashboard filters, remove the values in the Purchase Order Date prompt and click Apply. When the results display, click on the Purchase Order Number and go to "Link to PO Balance Details", which shows the details from BearBuy.

To return to the Encumbrances report, click the Return link below the report in the bottom left corner of the window.

Prompts

  • Business Unit is a required prompt and is set to 1 – UC Berkeley by default.
  • For best performance, use the prompts to filter on Account, Fund, Org, CF1, CF2, Purchase Order Number, Journal Order Number, Journal ID, or Preparer Name.

Useful to Know

  • Negative amounts are reductions of the original Encumbrance Amount, a positive amount.

Cross Reference with BearBuy:A drill across on the Purchase Order Number column takes you to the Procure to Pay area so you can see the data as sourced from BearBuy. You can cross reference this with Encumbrance Reporting, where the data is sourced from BFS. Once you drill on Purchase Order Number and it goes to the Procure to Pay Operations dashboard, remove the values in the Purchase Order Date prompt and click Apply again. Click on the Purchase Order Number and go to "Link to PO Balance Details", which shows the details from BearBuy. It takes about 1-2 minutes for the Link to PO Balance Details drill down to load. The initial drill for the day will likely take 2 minutes, then subsequent drills will likely take 1 minute.

The Encumbrance Amount in Encumbrance Reporting tells you the remaining balance or remaining encumbrance that is owed to the vendor. The Link to PO Balance Details view tells you what the original encumbrance is in BearBuy (Purchase Order Monetary Amount column), what the amount that has already been paid is (Total Voucher Monetary Amount), and what the remaining amount owed to the vendor is (Estimated Purchase Order Balance column).

Most of the time the Encumbrance Amount in Encumbrance Reporting matches the Estimated Purchase Order Balance in the Link to PO Balance Details, both of which tell you the remaining balance or remaining encumbrance that is owed to the vendor. When they do not match, it may be due to additional transactions processed in BearBuy that did not flow to BFS. This is a known issue where BearBuy and BFS sometimes do not match, and is separate from the scope of the Encumbrance report. When they do not match, it is an alert for you to investigate further. Many users rely on BFS as the final source of "truth".

User Experience Tips

  • This report is different from the other reports within the General Ledger Reporting dashboard in that it shows open POs for all time (as defined by January 2012 to present), whereas the other reports ask you to indicate a specific fiscal year and accounting period. There are no timeframe prompts in this report because the intended use is to understand what is still open and what the balances are in real time, not what was open and what the balance was at a point in time. For a history of the transactions, drill on the Encumbrance Amount and/or run the General Ledger Detail tab to review encumbrances for past months.
  • This report defaults to showing balances by chartstring. If want to see balances by PO, select the By Purchase Order view or move the Purchase Order Number column to the first column.
  • When searching on the Preparer Name prompt by a portion of the name, the case needs to match the entry. For example, when searching by the last name "Doe", and the entry is "Jane Doe", search "%Doe%" and not "%doe%". Position the "%" to match the entry. For example, for entry "Jane Doe [UID: 1234567]", searching by the first name "Jane" requires "Jane%", and searching by "UID: 1234567" requires "%1234567%".
  • The "Exclude 0 PO Total Amount" checkbox prompt is calculated based on the parameters selected. For example, you have a PO that is split across two Org Level L4s in the same L3, and the total for one L4 is 0 and the total for the other L4 is non-zero such that it is non-zero at the L3 level. If you prompt on the L4 where the total is 0, and check the box, you won't see this PO. If you prompt on the L3 and check the box, you will see this PO.
  • When reviewing the data in the By Chartstring view, you could be seeing just the partial balance of a PO, if the PO is split across several chartstrings. If want to see everything for a PO, review the data in the By Purchase Order view. Likewise, a search by chartstring means you could be seeing just the partial balance of a PO that belongs to the parameters you selected. If you want to see everything for a PO, you can search by Purchase Order Number instead.
    • When searching on the Purchase Order Number prompt, your query may take longer to run because this field is actually a grouped field with additional logic behind it and isn't just a pure data field. It shows the PO number if the transaction is a PO, and it shows the PO number that is associated if the transaction is a journal (most likely the closing-out journal titled FPPOADJUST), so that you see all POs and journals grouped under the same PO number. The reason it takes longer is that it needs to scan the database for all time (as defined by January 2012 to present) not just for the PO number you want, but it's also doing the calculation in the backend to assign the grouping value. To experience faster performance, pair this prompt with other prompts (if you know them) to narrow the search.]
    • You can search for only one PO at a time with the Purchase Order Number and Journal ID prompts, because these are text box prompts. With dropdown prompts, which are the rest of the prompts and have a dropdown menu, you can search multiple values separated by a semi-colon. These are text box prompts and not dropdown prompts because there are endless individual POs and Journal IDs such that loading them all in a dropdown significantly impacts performance.

Text box prompt:

Dropdown prompt: Visit the data dictionary for prompt and column definitions.

Data Notes

  • You might see POs that are recognized as Closed in BearBuy but not Complete or Canceled in BFS. Cal Answers is consistent with BFS, so the PO not being closed in BFS may have to do with the PO not being properly closed in BearBuy such that the action is done in error and doesn't get communicated to BFS. You can ask the BearBuy team to "finalize the close" of the PO in BearBuy such that the Closed status gets communicated to BFS, Once BFS is also closed, the PO drops off from the Cal Answers Encumbrance report so you don't see it anymore. If you can't or prefer not to "finalize the close, you can ignore these POs instead, especially if they have an FPPOADJUST journal entry that cancels out the remaining balance.
  • Even when you check the "Exclude 0 PO Total Amount" box, you may still see zeroes in the individual lines. The total PO amount is still non-zero, it's just that a portion of the PO that is broken out into a particular chartstring is zero. When you add the subtotal on the PO number, you will see that it is not zero. In the By Chartstring view, you can even move the Purchase Order number column to the far left as the first column to more easily see this.
  • BAIRS doesn't show closing-out journals (typically titled as FPPOADJUST) for many of the older POs, while Cal Answers does. This means you might come across non-zero PO totals in BAIRS that are zeroed out in Cal Answers because Cal Answers does show the FPPOADJUST entries. This makes Cal Answers the more accurate reporting source. When comparing BAIRS to Cal Answers, if you don't initially see the PO in Cal Answers but you see it in BAIRS, run Cal Answers again with the Exclude 0 PO Total Amount box unchecked, because it might be that Cal Answers has that PO with a zero total.
  • This report shows data for all time, as defined by January 2012 to present, which is when the initial BearBuy transactions were posted. The report does not go further back because transactions prior to January 2012 are under the legacy business process. Data from July 2010 (what BAIRS goes back to) through December 2011 is incomplete due to the incomplete manner in which many POs were closed out in the transition from the legacy business process to BearBuy. Furthermore, the drill across on Purchase Order Number that goes to the Procure to Pay subject area shows data from BearBuy. A drill across on a legacy PO number would yield no data or strange amounts. In order to provide the most streamlined, cleanest data possible with drill across data that makes sense, this report focuses on BearBuy POs, which start from January 2012. This means the vast majority of PO numbers you see start with "BB".
    • If you see non-BB POs, it likely means they were legacy POs from before BearBuy was implemented. They are attached to journals (typically titled as FPPOADJUST in the Journal ID column) done to close them out. Although this report excludes legacy POs by themselves, it includes them if they are attached to closing-out journals because the campus units that create these journals need to see them reflected to make sure the PO is actually closed out. Although there is a drill across to the Procure-to-Pay area, keep in mind POs that don't start with BB most likely will yield no results in this drill across.

Additional Context

  • The BearBuy A/P Status is one of two possible values- Open or Closed. The BFS PO Status has multiple values, of which Complete (C) or Canceled (X) tie with Closed in BearBuy. Canceled doesn't occur much anymore. The remaining statuses in BFS tie with Open in BearBuy, mostly Dispatched (D) because when BFS gets a PO from BearBuy, it has already been dispatched to the vendor. When the BearBuy A/P Status changes to Closed, the BFS PO Status changes to Complete, usually overnight but sometimes with a lag of a day or more.