By Michelle Moody, Deputy Director, FI$Cal Business Operation and Solutions Division
Over the past year, FI$Cal has been rolling out a series of WorkCenters to help users access specific and prioritized tasks and actions in a central location. The WorkCenters offer a big boost to users doing their daily jobs.
The WorkCenter page is role-based and configurable, offering users a consolidated view of tasks, queries and reports. The dashboard provides a visually rich user experience with graphs, charts, tables and more that display summarized data. Users can personalize and tailor their information by adding or removing links, reports and queries. Users benefit from centralized, intuitive navigation.
With the gradual rollout, different modules are now available to help users in almost every task in FI$Cal. Approvers see requests waiting for approvals. Buyers gain quick access to frequently used queries, reports and links to statewide purchasing policy. Accounts Payable (AP) processors can efficiently perform their daily tasks – such as creating vouchers, verifying matching exceptions and verifying budget check errors. These dashboards, in short, offer one-stop transaction processing for most key functions.
The idea for WorkCenters came from the MyFI$Cal concept developed by users at the Imagine FI$Cal workshop in Los Angeles about a year and a half ago. We started with releases of WorkList and General Ledger (GL) modules, and we’ve been adding them ever since.
One example is the GL WorkCenter, which offers users of GL and related accounting functions a single place to perform tasks that include reconciliation, journal functions with exception alerts, creating and updating journal entries, copying/editing/budget checking, submitting journals and reaching the most frequently used items such as queries, reports and other important links. The GL WorkCenter recently was updated, so it now displays several popular links to key GL processes and reports. One exciting new feature is the GL WorkCenter dashboard, which displays pending journals for reconciliation purposes and the Remaining Spending Authority (RSA) by Program. The WorkList WorkCenter can be used to filter out the GL Worklist by using the search options to narrow down the search result as well as to search for a particular journal ID.
In October we released a Purchase Order (PO) WorkCenter for buyers to conveniently access and view their own purchasing activities and alerts. Information is also available at the department level for the buyer. Data is quickly viewable as graphs on a dashboard and provides topic links for the buyer to have direct access to purchase transactions. In addition, buyers gain access to frequently used queries, reports and links.
We also have WorkCenters for AP, Accounts Receivable, Requisitions, Asset Management and Events. WorkCenter is secure and maintains security and access limited to users’ roles. A WorkCenter administrator can add new queries and links, making the tool highly configurable.
FI$Cal will continue updating WorkCenter modules to help users streamline many of their tasks. For detailed instructions on how to use WorkCenter, users can access job aids in ServiceNow. Users must be logged into PeopleSoft to view the job aids.