Community Exchange

Stacy - we had recently looked into using Banner's JE approval workflow but I found that it was a bit lacking in terms of a true end to end clean process so we decided to keep our current process. Happy to discuss with you if you would like to contact me directly. My email is fdipenti@ramapo.edu and we can set up time to chat. 

Stacy,

Guess I am a bit puzzled.  There is FGAJVCD in Banner 9 INB (admin pages).  That is journal voucher entry.  We use that form here.  

Is your institution not using Banner Finance approvals process at all?  If not, then might want to bite the bullet and pay for consulting assistance to configure that.  FOASYSC form, which you may not have access to, has an APPROVAL OVERRIDE INFORMATION page on it.  That is where you can turn approvals on/off for 8 specific document types, including journal vouchers.  Can set for if turn on if impliciit or explicit approvals.  The basic process is, if approvals turned on, when complete a document, that sends to the approval process.  FORAPPL will process and based on approvals configuration, assign the approvals needed, with the concept of approving in order (though the option to approve out of order).  FORAPPL keeps running and checking for the last approval.  If NSF, after last approval, will send to NSF queueu for that approval.  After last approval, then sends to the posting queue (FOIAPPD).  Posting process will run and post.  

Storing documentation.  BDM (Banner Document Management) is what Ellucian will recommend.  Can access from Banner INB (that is the RETRIEVE option on top right of a form page).  That is a whole other topic.  If not using BDM today, probably will want to pay for implementation assistance.

Journal voucher entry is pretty basic in my mind (FGAJVCD).  The approvals is the complex part.  That is where would need consulting help if no one there knows how to do Finance approval configuration.  That would be a multi day class to learn that.  

There is an option as well to use FUPLOAD to load a journal entry into GURFEED and feed to Finance, but that is clunky (1990's type technology).

Very high level response.  Hope this helps a little.

John - thanks for the outline. BDM is where we found the process to be a bit more cumbersome than I liked so I opted not to adopt the workflow approval and keep our current semi-manual process because of it.

For what its worth, my team does use the FUPLOAD process and that works very nicely. Saves them a lot of time.

A few features I wish Banner had are 1) auto reversing of accrual entries, and 2) the ability to create recurring journals (same GL accounts with the same Dr and Cr amounts each month) for future period postings. I had those features when I used SAP and Oracle in past roles and those would be great time savers. If anyone knows of ways to do either of these in Banner, please reach out to me. 

Frank,

Look at FGAAUTO.  That is the automatic journal voucher form in Banner.  Allows you to create recurring journals.  We use it a bit.  Not a lot, but a bit.  

Do not know if this makes a difference, but you can do the COPY on FGAJVCD and take an existing journal and copy it and check the Reverse JV box to do a reversing entry.  Not automated as I would consider automated, but something to play with in a test instance, if not aware of that feature.

Thanks John - we'll check out the Copy process and FGAAUTO. 

Thanks for the replies! We got a lot of great info and are testing some things out. I appreciate everyone taking the time to answer.