FI$Cal has provided an upgrade to the PeopleSoft system that will bring an improvement to State Treasurer’s Office (STO) bank reconciliations. Known as the PeopleSoft Upgrade Manager (PUM) 18 Expanded Bank Reconciliation functionality, this enhancement will provide greater automation to the settling of $2.5 trillion in annual bank transactions that flow through the STO.
PUM 18 Bank Reconciliation functionality serves as a window into the future – an example of FI$Cal’s desire to bring “off-the-shelf” technology to departments instead of working to customize upgrades. Off-the-shelf upgrades such as PUM mean that FI$Cal’s IT team does not need to worry about the stability of the underlying PeopleSoft system each time an upgrade is made.
FI$Cal’s move from Version 9.1 of PeopleSoft to Version 9.2 required a year of planning and eight months of regression testing to make sure everything worked. Each time an enhancement is customized, it risks destabilizing the overall system. When Oracle provides PUM upgrades, it tests the code to make sure it functions properly in PeopleSoft, preventing the need for FI$Cal staff to undertake this time-consuming process. FI$Cal is constantly looking at new features in PeopleSoft and remains in frequent contact with Oracle, its manufacturer, to push for changes that will benefit departments.
The original auto-reconciliation feature that came with the PeopleSoft system did not meet STO’s business needs for matching transactions such as “many to many,” “one to many” and “many to one” reconciliation. That prompted the need for complex customizations without which the STO would have been forced to retain its legacy system. The customizations, which included a custom “STO Semi-Manual Reconciliation” page, enabled FI$Cal to satisfy the business requirements for STO bank reconciliation.
The addition of the PUM features, which the STO is now working to implement, will bring more automation and less human intervention in bank reconciliations, with fewer challenges when future system application updates roll out.
Another benefit to using off-the-shelf updates: Simpler functionality for users. The PUM 18 upgrade includes new pages, components, application engine programs, message catalog entries, PeopleCode and the ability to migrate configuration data across environments. User friendliness is improved with easy-to-configure reconciliation rules, and users can reconcile multiple transaction lines to multiple bank statement lines and reconcile transactions to bank statement lines using parsed addenda information.