1. Financial Journal Form
Excel Upload Version
Financial Journal Form

2. Standard Financial Journal Form
-This is ERSO FJ form.
-This form is the link that connects the original transaction, the purpose and authority for the cost transfer, and the actual BFS journal.
-This form is a map that will guide future reviewers to the necessary parts of any cost transfer and because it is rooted in policy, it guides the RA to compliance. -There are some challenges for RA’s due to the structure of this form.
-At times it can be limiting (19 line) and because of the single cell fields, it requires the RA to duplicate work through manual assembly and entry of data, such as the chartstring, which must later be separated and entered into BFS to prepare the FJ for submission.
-If you’ve ever been working on a long FJ and had to stop to ask yourself “WHY?!!” I am here to show you an alternative way……

3. Excel Upload Financial Journal Form
THE EXCEL UPLOAD FINANCIAL JOURNAL FORM!
-This form was created in the ERSO labs by Excel Engineers to give RA’s a way to automate and reduce duplication of work in the cost transfer process while maintaining the structure and value of the ERSO FJ form.
Okay, maybe not exactly excel engineers but our very own Gwen Lindsey originally developed this form as a way to streamline the BAIRS to BFS transfer of data.
-As you can see, the form includes the mandatory values and is nearly identical to the current ERSO form with the exception that RA’s have the capability to cut and paste data in the 1:1 cell format that we receive it from BAIRS which is the same format format that we need to upload our journal to BFS….

4. Before I get started with this demonstration, let me say that that from what I can tell, no two RA’s are alike.
We all have our systems for managing our work and we all have our own methods for harvesting and preparing our financial data.
For most of us, that preparation and analysis includes Excel to some degree, but for all of us, our cost transfers start in BAIRS.
With that being said, that is where I am will begin my demonstration, in BAIRS, where I have just run a report for several months of IDSG charges which need to be transferred from my PI’s closing federal fund to his gift funding……
When I ran my BAIRS report, I limited the query to a list of the account codes and months that I knew included my charges.
I wasn’t concerned about excluding charges that I didn’t want at this point but I did want to structure my data in a way that would easily transfer into the FJ form so I set up a pivot to organize the data that I need for my FJ in a manner that is consistent with the FJ form.
You can see this format in the Row Labels section: is Doc_Date-Account Code-Fund Code-Org Code-Program Code-Final project-Final Flex- Journal Line Desc-DocID & actuals amount
These are all fields that we use on the current FJ form and that we will need for our Excel FJ.
To transfer this data from BAIRS to EXCEL where I can review and exclude charges that I don’t want, I simply place my curser on the pivot in BAIRS, copy then paste the data into an Excel spreadsheet (OPEN THE DATA NOW)

5. Whatever your preferred method may be to limit and transfer your data from BAIRS to Excel, you will need to arrange it in this order to prepare your original transaction data for the form.

6. -Once we have our data prepared, it is time to paste it into the FJ form
- Let’s assume that we’ve already completed that header & justification fields on the FJ form and it is time to transfer our data from our Excel sheet to our FJ form…..we do this through 3 separate cut and paste blocks.
-We need to paste the values only, in 3 separate blocks.
It is necessary to paste the data in 3 blocks to maintain the form features that help us transition to a successful upload in BFS.
OPEN FORM AND TRANSFER DATA
You will see, on the right, one of the form features which is a column of reversed values – the form automatically reverses the debits to credits so the you can easily cut and paste to replace the debit values with credits
– once you’ve added the credits to your line, notice that the values have been recalculated to reverse the sign for you to use when it is time to offset the credit entries
DEMONSTRATE

7. -Once you have all of your data in the FJ form, it is time to check your data for errors which will cause you to have an upload error in BFS.
-The form makes it easy for you to identify errors with built in alerts.
Character errors in description/reference fields
Exceeded value limits in description/reference fields
Shows places after the decimal because we may only have values in two
DEMONSTRATE?
-Discuss slide then…..(DEMONSTRATE)

8. -Once we know that our data does not have errors that will prohibit upload we can add the balancing entries to the lines below.
-We will again copy our data in blocks and paste values only…
-However, now we will only copy and paste the fields that will remain the same: in my example, I am only changing the Fund – so I will need to paste the DocDate, Account Code, Dept ID-Reference.
- DEMONSTRATE
-Now it is time to enter the monetary amounts – recall the column with the reverses signs? We can copy the values from there and paste – VALUES ONLY to offset our credits with debits
-DEMONSTRATE

9. -All of our date is now included in the form
-We need to check to confirm that the SUM of our debits & credits are zero
-DEMONSTRATE

10. -Once you’ve completed this step, you are ready to print the full journal for your team lead to approve (PDF or Actual Print)
-All of our journal lines are included with one form

11. -Now it is time to prepare our data to upload to BFS
-For those of you who use the BFS FJ upload you know that our file must be saved as a .csv so we need to copy our data and the headers to a new excel sheet and save as a .csv
-DEMONSTRATE
– Copy - Ctrl N for new worksheet & demonstrate how to save with file name JOURNALID_YYYYMMDD

12. CAL Components>Import/Export File Service>File Import>Journal Import>CSV GL Actuals> ENTER JOURNAL Parameters ….
Review….General Ledger>Journal Entry>Create/Update journal> Find Ex Value> search
-Note that PC chartfields are automatically populated when using the excel upload method.