7/1/99 - Decision Support Release 3.1
4/7/99 - UCD Accounting Terminology
4/1/99 - Decision Support Release 3.0
1/23/99 - Transaction Processing Release 2.5

This is a minor update to Decision Support, mainly incorporating a number of smaller modifications. There are, however, a couple of significant updates.

Access Manager System Update
Access managers now have the ability to restrict access to DSOnly users by sub-account and project. These attributes may be used within an Account or an Organization. With this requested functionality, Access Managers can not only restrict access of a DSOnly user to a particular account or organization, but to specific sub-accounts and/or projects within that account or organization.

Equipment Physical Inventory Listing (206) (Capital Asset Management System)
A new CAMS report that was designed by the DS CAT Subcomittee to aid Equipment Managers in performing their required annual physical inventory. This report lists relevant information for locating and identifying equipment, as well as allowing the user to sort and group the information in several different ways.

Layout Modification of General Ledger Category
A number of the reports have been moved within the General Ledger category. The additional sub-categories are designed to help you find what queries will suit your needs more quickly. Many queries now appear in multiple categories so that there is less guessing as to how queries were categorized. For example, there are now categories for Sub-account Reports, Project Reports, Encumbrance Reports, and Object Reports. The table below describes where queries have moved to. All other reports were copied and are still available in their old locations.

Other Changes
A number of smaller changes were made to DS with this release. Here is a short description of each.

Asset Lookup (143) - Added checkbox to suppress retired assets from this report.

Summary of Transactions by Account (52) and Summary of Transactions by Object (47) - These reports have been modified to remove their ability to cross fiscal years. Due to the way carry-forwards work in DaFIS, these reports would return erroneous results when run across fiscal years. These reports have also been enhanced to provide the same criteria as the Summary of Account Balances and the Summary of Object Balances.

Sub Fund Summary by Account (57) and Sub Fund Summary by Consolidation (55) - These reports now have the capability to suppress the prior year history while maintaining the balance forwards on Contract and Grant accounts. A checkbox has been added to the criteria page titled "Suppress History?". This chekcbox will have no effect on non-cumulative accounts. Also, these reports now display the award end date at each OP Fund grouping.

Transactions by Project (25) - This report now displays a beginning and ending balance for the selected project.(It still displays the total of transactions on the report separately.)

Transaction Listing by Consolidation (110); Transaction Listing by Object (26)
Transaction Listing by Project/Consol (187); Transaction Listing by Sub-account (22)
Transaction Listing by Sub Acct/Consol (153) and Transaction Listing by w/Payroll Detail (179) - These queries have all had Object Consolidation and Object added as criteria.

Organization Expenditure Summary (190) (Formerly Annual Organization Expenditure Summary) - This report has been enhanced to include many new critieria options. Including: multi-month capability (hence the name change), Sub Fund Group, Sub Fund Group Type, OP Fund, Higher Education Function Code, and Object Consolidation.

Summary of Object Expenditures by Org (157) - Added Sub Fund Group, Sub Fund Group Type, and OP Fund to criteria.

Reference Control Account Ledger (73) - Added ability to run for multiple, specified accounts.

FIS User Lookup (86) - A checkbox has been added to allow the report to return inactive FIS Users.
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4/7/99

Accounting & Financial Services has created a new resource in the form of a glossary of terms common to UCD accounting practices. You will find the link on the Accounting & Financial Services web site.
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4/1/99

There are a number of changes in this release of Decision Support. Due to the size of this release, the following is a very brief outline. For more details on the changes, log into Decision Support and click the "What's New" link on the Qeury Category page (available 4/5).

Contracts and Grants Account Lookup (198) (Reference Table Queries)- This report is an enhanced version of the Account Lookup report with information tailored to reporting on C&G Accounts. It also takes more funding based criteria than the Account Lookup.

Sub Object Lookup (195)(Reference Table Queries) - This lookup allows reporting of the defined sub-objects. This will assist in determining whether sub-objects are set up in all the places desired before being unable to do a transaction in TP or having the sub-object defaulted on a feed.

Encumbrance Summary by Tracking Number (200) (General Ledger) - This is a new encumbrance only report. It is different from Current Encumbrance Balances in that it runs by fiscal period - identical to the rest of the GL reports.

Budget Summary by Project (198) and Budget Summary by Project Consolidation (197) (General Ledger/Budget Queries) - Two new budget reports have been added. They are based on the project number and use it as their top-level grouping. These were requested by the budget office for departments who do their budgeting by project code.

With the addition of these last 2 reports, all of the budget reports have been moved to a sub-category of General Ledger titled Budget Queries. With the number of ledger reports increasing, it is becoming necessary to categorize the queries to help direct users to the queries they need. Expect to see more General Ledger queries move into categories in the next few months.

Account Lookup (11) (Reference Table Queries) - Account Lookup now supports querying by Principal Investigator Name instead of User ID. This will allow querying of accounts that belong to 'NOUSERID' P.I.s.

Sub-account Lookup (6) (Reference Table Queries) - This report now displays the accounts associated with sub-accounts when querying by organization. This new behavior can be turned off by deselecting the new checkbox on the criteria page.

Billing ID Lookup (74) (Reference Table Queries) - Billing ID Lookup now has criteria for looking up IDs by Account and Principal Investigator. The output has been enhanced to include the Account Name, OP Fund and PI Name.

Sub Fund Summary by Consolidation (55) and Sub Fund Summary by Account (57) (General Ledger) - The criteria for these 2 report has been enhanced considerably. These reports now have the capability to report for a range of fiscal periods. When using a range of months, it only reports the activity during those months and it must be run with the Summary Type criteria set to "Monthly Activity". These reports can now be run for multiple Charts, and/or multiple Sub Fund Groups at a time. They also have the option to display pre-encumbrances and to query by Sub Fund Group Type. For those long reports, both of these reports now give the option to return the report in Rich Text Format, which will return the query to your word processor for printing.

Annual Organization Expenditure Summary (190) (General Ledger) - The output of this report has been modified to merge the Academic Salaries columns into 1 to make room for an indirect costs column. Note: this column will be all zeros if Exclude Overhead is checked on the criteria screen.

Transactions by Project (25) (General Ledger/Transaction Listing Reports) - The criteria for this report has been modified to allow multiple charts to be selected and can also be run for a range of fiscal periods.

Transaction Listing by Consolidation (110); Transaction Listing by Object (26); Transaction Listing by Sub Account (22); Transaction Listing by Sub Acct/Consol (153); and Transaction Listing by Project/Consol (187) (General Ledger/Transaction Listing Reports) - For users of sub-accounts: A change was introduced in the 2.1 release of Decision Support that affected the length of your reports. Namely, DS stopped suppressing $0.00 balance accounts on these reports. This caused problems when specifying a sub-account in your criteria because DS now returned a header and $0.00 balance line for every account selected that had a $0.00 balance in that sub-account or DID NOT HAVE that sub-account.

With this release, the behavior has been changed to that if you enter a sub-account, only those accounts which have that sub-account defined within them will be returned. In addition, to reduce the need for manual editing of the RTF version of these reports prior to printing, $0.00 balance accounts WILL BE SUPPRESSED from the RTF version alone. $0.00 balance accounts will still appear when you return the query to the browser.

There are 3 major changes to the DS system in this release.

Query Parameter Saving System: This system allows each user to save particular queries (with parameters) to their own personal folder. Each one can be given a name and description and put in to a folder within your Saved Queries folder which will appear at the top of the main menu after you save your first query. In Addition, once you have saved a query or created a folder, you can share it with other users. Then that user can run the same query without having to enter any parameters. (For more information on this new function, and complete instructions, see the "What's New" in Decision Support.)

Automatic Messaging: A message facility has been added to DS to notify users of load failures. Previously, a developer had to come in and notice the load failure before a message would go up. With this new system, DS automatically checks whether all tables have completed loading at about 6:00 a.m. If something has occured with the load (either a failure or it is just running long), then a message is automatically put up at the top of the DS menu page. This message will have a link to a list of reports that MAY be affected by the incomplete load.

Enhancements to the Access Manager System: The new access manager interface allows for a hierarchical delegation of authority between managers. Top level managers are assigned authority over their entire organizations. These managers can then delegate all or part of their authority down to lower level managers. Any manager can also grant access to DSOnly users within their delegated authority. New training material will be available describing the new functionality of the Access Manager system. Look for it on the Training Documents page.
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1/23/99

Below is a list of the changes included in this release:

Changes to the Interdepartmental Bill

The limitation on processing transactions that use SUBFUND RESRER on the IB has been removed. Accounts with this subfund may now be charged using an IB.

Changes to the Travel Expense Voucher

The object code 2700 with subtype RM for "REMOVAL&MOVING EXPENSE" may now be used on the TEV by itself. The old restriction that at least one object must be subtype TR has been changed to subtype TR or RM.

Changes to printing for Purchasing documents

All printed purchasing documents now print the vendor fax number. This field was previously being left blank.

Changes to CAMS documents

The CAMS documents will no longer allow the use of generic commodity codes.

Changes to the Account Maintenance document

The Seconday C & G screen of the Account Maintenance document has been changed to allow more options for Federal Flow Through (FFT). This change will be used mostly by Accounting.
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