Miscellaneous Deposits

Issue Source: Atlas Helpdesk, OF Regional Support Teams, OIST

Affected Parties: Headquarters, Country Offices

Categorization: Efficiency – Office Organization/User Capacity, Efficiency – Application Usability, Policy – Process Prescription/Procedure

The pending item and regular deposits are configured to capture donor contributions since the default accounting entry is to the 51005 (Contributions Income) account. Any miscellaneous receipts of cash such as refunds should be captured through a direct journal deposit. Direct journals with project data for the expenditure accounts and NEX advances are loaded into project resource thru GL with analysis type DJA.

However, many users use income accounts (accounts that start with 5) when they create AR Direct Journal Deposits to record miscellaneous deposits from vendors, donors or staff. The system is configured in the way that it will not transfer any income from such direct journals to the Project Resource table. However Commitment Control is updated and the income is still available for spending.

The system allows usage of the income accounts, even though users have been instructed not to. But the system does not interface this information into the Projects Resource table, it only interfaces direct journals recorded to expenditure and NEX advance accounts. Users are continuing to enter these directly journal deposits despite guidance otherwise. At the current time, they should be using pending items as an alternative to record project-related income.

The risk of this problem is that project counterparts may overlook the recorded contributions when studying the PBB reports.

There are several possible resolutions. More extensive guidance can be provided to country offices including webcasts and/or OnDemand content. Monitoring queries could be developed to highlight violations, and data cleanup instructions could be modified to include these queries and procedures on how to clean up prior issues. Finally, a longer-term possibility is to modify the interface of direct journals into projects so that deposits with income accounts are also included. However, further analysis would be required to the suitability of this change.