The Organization Accounting tool enables campuses to manage their organizations' purchase and funding requests within Engage. This feature is designed to be flexible with many user-based options. It will adapt to a variety of finance procedures and is powerful enough to replace traditional methods of manual record keeping. To begin exploring the feature, sign in to your campus’s Engage site, and switch to the Admin view. From the "Finance" dropdown on this page, you can administratively manage your Organization Accounting tools.
Creating and Managing Accounts
This is the first step in implementing Organization Accounting and should be revisited as your organizations grow and develop on campus. Create organization accounts and map them to parent accounts. Organization leaders can view their accounts' histories and make purchase requests to spend (pay) or transfer money from the account or funding requests to allocate or deposit money to the account. Organizations on campuses leveraging Budgeting can also make budgeting requests for a more detailed funding process that can even measure purchase requests against budgeted line items.
The Account Tree provides a quick look at all of your accounts and how they are connected. Click into an account to view detail on its balance, available funds, and encumbered funds. You can also review the account's request and transaction history from this view, as well as add transactions unaffiliated with funding or purchase requests.
Classifying the Finance Process
Also within the Finance section of Admin, you have the ability to create various classifications and categorizations of your finance process that both provide transparency of the process to the student organization leader as well as enhance your reporting. It is ideal to set these up as part of your implementation before launching to students, but you may also choose to regularly review these classifications to ensure they accurately reflect your process and reporting needs.
Click the name of the tool to learn more about its configuration:
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Customizing the Funding and Purchase Request Forms
Funding and Purchase requests are both special forms submitted by your organization leaders that have been pre-formatted to gather all of the basic information you need to process a transaction on behalf of an organization and review the details later. You can also add additional fields to these forms unique to your campus process. This is the last step of building out Organization Accounting prior to launching to students.
Managing Incoming Requests
Once you launch Organization Accounting, you will need to manage your incoming requests by going to your Admin view, selecting the Finance dropdown, and clicking the Requests List. You must be an administrator with at least "Finance: Full" access to take action on finance requests. After clicking on a request, you can review its history, change its stage and status as well as modify details from the request itself.
**Approving or Completing a request will not remove or add funds from an account, but instead, communicate to the organization the status of their request. To move the funds from the account, complete a transaction.
Creating a Transaction Tied to a Request
Transactions can be created immediately following the request approval; buttons will display at the top of the page for the appropriate type of transaction based on the request. These buttons will only appear on Funding Requests that are Completed or Purchase Requests which have been Approved.
For Funding Requests, you will see the option for Deposit or Allocate transactions. For Purchase Requests, you will see the option for Payment or Transfer transactions. If you are creating the transaction from the request page, simply click on the appropriate button at the top of the approved request page.
Creating a Transaction Through the Account or Transaction Import
Transactions can also be created directly through the account affiliated with the transaction or imported in bulk using the Transaction Import. Both of these are useful options for transactions that may not have been requested
You've now fully created your organization accounting process and are ready to manage requests! Be sure to also familiarize yourself with the organization's view of their account(s) and requests.