Subscribe to the SSDT Newsletter by clicking here.  Your email will be added to a distribution list.             

News You Can Use About USPS-R and EMIS

Someday, we'll find it...   the USPS-R and EMIS-R connection...  the payroll staff, the EMIS staff and ITC... 

SSDT is doing everything we can to provide more information on the USPS-R & EMIS-R connection with the following helpful hints and reports that we hope will bridge the relationship between USPS-R and EMIS reporting.  

Did you know??

There is an EMIS entry area in USPS-R that can be found under Core>EMIS Entry. It can be utilized to enter necessary EMIS data if not already populated in the Employee>Position screens.  There are tab options available for EMIS Employee Entry (CI records), EMIS Position Entry (CK records) as well as EMIS Contracted Service Entry (CC records).  If a district needs to enter in EMIS Contractor (CJ records), the EMIS Contractor Module under SYSTEM>MODULES will need to be turned on so that this tab is available under Core>EMIS Entry.  There are specific Roles created that will allow an employee to read only or access and enter the EMIS data as required.  These roles LEGACY-EMIS-READONLY-USER or LEGACY_EMIS_USER can be granted to a user as the district deems necessary (many times used for an EMIS Coordinator).

Guess what??

If for some reason you need to report different data other than what is found on the Position and Compensation records for Contract Amount, Contract Workdays, Hours in the Day or FTE for an employee, you can do that.  All you need to do is go into the Position record and under the EMIS Related Information section add the information that you want to be reported to EMIS for the employee. These fields are considered override fields and, if populated, will be pulled by the SIF data collector for EMIS reporting. If these fields are left blank, then the Position and Compensation records are used to pull in the specific staff data needed for EMIS reporting.

How do I update Experience??

The Total, Authorized and Principal Years of Experience are reported to EMIS on the Initial and Final Staff/Course (L) Collections. This means that at the beginning of the fiscal year, the Years of Experience on the Employee records will need to be updated.

Option 1-This can be easily done for Total and Authorized Years by creating a CSV file for loading and then the user can process the Mass Load program found under Utilities. See the New Fiscal Year/Initial L Reporting USPS-R EMIS Checklist for complete instructions on using this process.

Option 2- Use the Mass Change program found under Employees simply by importing the Increment Experience json file that can be found at Redesign Shared Report or Mass Change Definitions.  The district can filter the Employee data on the grid and then use the Mass Change process. See the New Fiscal Year/Initial L Reporting USPS-R EMIS Checklist for complete instructions on using this process.  

*NOTE*   To Mass Change Experience, an employee must not have null or zero experience years listed. Those records are not to be included in the filtered data and will need to be manually updated if applicable. 

**NOTE** Principal Years of Experience should be manually updated as required.

Exciting News!!

There is a new canned report, EMIS Data Collection Reports, that can assist with verifying staff data for EMIS reporting. The report is available under Reports>EMIS Reports. You have the option to run the report for Employee data (CI records) or Position data (CJ records).  All you need to do is click on the respective button. When choosing the Employee tab, you will get the Employee Number, Employee Name, EMIS ID and any possible errors that are occurring on the Employee records.  If you choose to generate the Position Report, you will see the Employee Number, Employee Name and the Position #/Local Contract Code listed. This report will also list any errors detected for an employee Position record.  There are also some reports that can be imported from the Redesign Shared Report or Mass Change Definitions page that can assist in verifying that there is data populated in the necessary EMIS element fields that are pulled in through the SIF data collection. The reports names are 

• EMIS Demographic Data Report.rpd-json,  
• EMIS Active Positions Report.rpd-json, 
• EMIS Inactive Positions Report.rpd-json , 
• EMIS Active Contract Compensation Report.rpd-json,  
• EMIS Active Non Contract Compensation Report.rpd-json, 
• EMIS Inactive Non Contract CompensationReport.rpd-json. 

The links for these reports along with the elements contained in the reports can also be found in the EMIS Checklists.

Speaking of the EMIS Checklists..

There are USPS-R/EMIS Checklists available in the documentation. The New Fiscal Year/Initial L Reporting  USPS-R EMIS Checklist will assist in getting the staff data ready for the new fiscal year for the Initial L EMIS reporting. The other checklist, Final L Reporting USPS-R EMIS Checklist will assist with making sure that staff data is ready for the Final L SIF data collection. 

Permanent Appropriations

Temporaries approved and completed   How do I turn these into permanent amounts?  It depends on if you need to change them and what is currently sitting on your proposed amounts grid.

s applied their budget as temporary at the beginning of the fiscal year. Now they have some changes to make to general fund accounts to make them permanent. Is there any way they can do that by a spreadsheet? I know they can manually change the amount on the 'Propose Amount', but they have a lot of accounts to update. Do you have any suggestions?

Now it's time to turn those temporaries into permanents.    When you are ready for your permanent, you would update NY proposed amounts as necessary in the proposed amounts grid and then select ‘permanent’.  The ‘tempinitial’ amount will be replaced with the ‘initial’ type amount while the increase/decrease will be reflected with a type of ‘GAAPAdjustment’   There is a screen shot in the documentation under Apply Proposed Amounts found here:   Proposed Amounts

I have a district that applied their proposed amounts as temporary. They now would like to apply the proposed amounts as permanent. The issue is that the treasurer has been making Budgeting Adjustments under Accounts. If the district makes the proposed amounts permanent will that override any budget adjustments that were done?

If the districts leaves the proposed amounts as temporary and does not make them permanent will that hurt anything?

 Is there a way to tell if proposed appropriations were applied as permanent? If you do not make them permanent what here is a report in the Public Reports Library under budgeting that can be helpful when looking at the Temporary & Permanent budget amounts and whether or not they were applied.   I will attach it to this ticket for convenience. The report will not include Adjustment type transactions but you will be able to tell if 'Full Year' was checked (or not) and if the temporary amounts were replaced with permanent amounts.  

We have been asked a question from a district about initial budget amounts and it sparked a discussion leading to the following questions. Your advice would be appreciated. Can you please explain why budget accounts and amounts remain in the proposed amounts grid after they are applied? I assume it is for later reference, but when would you need to reference that? Doesn’t leaving these on the grid increase the risk of applying outdated amounts at a future date?  

The proposed amount grid is the working area where the user can add, delete, or edit their proposed amounts.  Once these amounts are ‘Applied’ to the accounts, the grid can be deleted if the user chooses to do so.  However, leaving these amounts in the Proposed Grid may be helpful in some circumstances like Applying your Permanent budgets or Adjustments later in the year.  

Districts often Apply their Temporary Budgets on or around July 1st and later they Apply their Permanent Budgets.   When you are ready for your permanent figures, you would go to the Proposed Amounts grid to update any amounts as necessary and then select ‘permanent’ when you go to Apply these amounts.  On the account, the ‘tempinitial’ amount will be replaced with the ‘initial’ type amount while the increase/decrease will be reflected with a type of ‘GAAPAdjustment’   There is a screen shot in the documentation under Apply Proposed Amounts found here:   https://wiki.ssdt-ohio.org/display/usasrdoc/Proposed+Amounts

You can also use the Proposed amounts grid to post adjustments.  When doing this, the amount entered on the grid should be equal to what the desired Expendable amount should be. Then the user would Apply these amounts and select Adjustment (instead of Temporary or Permanent).  The system will then do the calculation and enter an adjustment on the account(s)for the difference.

Here is an example:

If the Initial Budget was 500.00 but the new Expendable amount should be 0.00, then the Adjustment entered in the Proposed Amounts grid should be 0.00. When applied, the Adjustment on the account will be -500.00.     https://wiki.ssdt-ohio.org/display/usasrdoc/Proposed+Amounts#ProposedAmounts-CreateProposedAmounts  (The user also has the option to do budget adjustments on the individual accounts.)

Regarding your question on the risk of applying outdated amounts at a future date....    The user has to pick the transaction type prior to selecting 'Apply' so they do have the opportunity to review the data prior to Applying these amounts to ensure they are the correct amounts.  The advantage of using the Proposed Amounts grid for adjustments would also be that whatever is on the Proposed Amounts grid would be the current applied figures.  If the user makes the adjustments on the individual accounts, these would not be in the Proposed Amounts grid.

First if they want the updated figures to show as the Initial budget

• If they still have all amounts in their grids for both Budget & Anticipated Revenue and applied the amounts as “Temporary” the first time around, they would be able to update just the accounts that they want changed and apply again as either Temporary or Permanent
• If they still have all amounts in their grids for both Budget & Anticipated Revenue and applied the amounts as “Permanent” the first time around, they would be able to update just the accounts that they want changed and apply again as Permanent
• The only situation I think they’d want to delete all and only enter the ones they need into the Proposed Amount grid is if some accounts have already been removed or updated and they want to make sure not to overwrite those Initial amounts

Next if they want the update to show as an adjustment (addition/deductions)

• They could just go into the Core > Accounts and enter the adjustments as needed this will show as part of the total Anticipated Revenue on their reports but not the initial amount.

If you are not sure if they applied as Permanent or Temporary there was recently a report added to the USAS-R Public Reports Library called Revenue Transactions – Initial Estimate that can help with this.