About Month End Close

We have made some slight revisions to the procedures that will be used to close each accounting period.

  1. Purchase requisitions from the prior month that are not yet submitted or are awaiting approval when the accounting period closes will remain active and editable by both requesters and approvers in the new accounting period.  Transactions that are not approved within 90 days will be purged from the system.

  2. Purchase orders that have not dispatched within 90 days will likewise be purged from the system.

  3. Employee expense reports from the prior month that are not yet submitted or are awaiting approval when the accounting period closes will remain active, however, will require the approver to change the accounting date of the transaction before applying their approval. 
    • If the expense report has not yet been submitted, the employee or their proxy will need to update the accounting date before submitting for approval. 
    • This change is in effect now.  A new job aid illustrating this process is available:
      Expenses Accounting Date Change pdf icon. 
    • A similar process to purge inactive expense reports after 90 days will be employed.

  4. Actuals journal entries that are not fully approved prior to closing will be will be deleted by Accounting Services.
    • Transaction owners will be notified in advance of the deletion.
    • If approvals cannot be made before closing, the owner can copy the journal into the next period before month end closing and request deletion of the original.
      • This gives owners additional time for approvals.
      • Note: This approach may not be appropriate for across fiscal years.

  5. A process will be used to ‘roll forward’ AP vouchers that have yet to match as part of month end close. 
    • This will not have a visible impact on end users, as AP transactions do not appear on budget statements until they are budget checked.  This occurs upon successful matching.

Additional steps will be taken at year end close to ensure a hard close of each fiscal year.  These processes will be similar to those used in CUFS and will be communicated as fiscal year end nears.

January/February FAMIS notes:

  • Correcting entries for Facilities management fees were entered and can be found in February budget reports.
  • The original (erroneous) entries can be found in January.

See also: Reporting Tips

HELP

For assistance, contact our help desk at 847-491-HELP (1-4357) option 2 or email consultant@northwestern.edu