Understanding the Commitment Accounting Interface

This section discusses:

  • Commitment accounting.

  • The commitment accounting interface.

Commitment Accounting

Commitment accounting, part of the Commitment Control feature in PeopleSoft Financials, helps your organization track financial obligations accurately and ensure that planned and actual expenses do not exceed budget.

A combination code (also referred to as a funding source) is a key that defines a valid combination of Standard Configuration ChartFields setup in FMS or HCM. These are the codes that you attach to components of your budget, such as earnings and deductions, to indicate the funding source the system should attribute to each expense. For example, if you account for salaries by department and project, you might attach a ChartField value of Department and Project to the Salaries combination code.

If you're using PeopleSoft Financials with Time and Labor you can integrate commitment accounting functionality with task reporting. This enables Time and Labor to automatically retrieve certain ChartField values when time reporters enter their time.

The Commitment Accounting Interface

To use the commitment accounting functionality with Time and Labor, you must create task templates, task profiles, and task groups that are enabled for the commitment accounting functionality. You then assign each time reporter who works in a department that is set up for commitment accounting functionality to a taskgroup defined for commitment accounting.

When time reporters enter their time, they must provide a combination code, and any other task elements you selected when defining the task template. Time and Labor uses the combination code to retrieve the appropriate ChartField values for the following fields:

  • Account

  • Alt Acct (alternate account)

  • Operating Unit

  • Fund Code

  • GL Department

  • Program Code

  • Class Field

  • Budget Reference

  • Product

  • Project ID

  • Affiliate

  • Fund Affiliate

  • Operating Unit Affiliate

  • ChartField1

  • ChartField2

  • ChartField3

Note:

ChartField values in FMS can be exported into the HCM Database through Integration Broker.

When you run the Time Administration process, Time and Labor performs the following validations on time reporters who belong to a commitment accounting taskgroup:

  • Verifies that, if a taskgroup was positively reported, the taskgroup is defined for commitment accounting. If the taskgroup is not defined for commitment accounting, the system generates an exception.

  • Determines if the time reporter changed departments or if the Use Actuals Distribution flag for the department changed. If either situation occurred, the Time Administration process generates an exception for the time reporter's default taskgroup. You can use the Maintain Time Reporter Data page to change the default taskgroup.

If you send payable time to Payroll for North America for processing, you can distribute costs associated with combination codes and ChartFields back to Project Costing after a pay run.

See PeopleSoft FSCM Project Costing for more details.

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