Madison Accounts Payable Purchase Order (Madison APPO)
Also referred to by the functional name “Business Process Changes for Fiscal Year 8 Transition to SFS”
Madison APPO will eliminate many legacy accounting control system programs and processes which are outdated and difficult to maintain. They will be replaced with programs and processes supported by Common Systems Software acquired by the UW System and maintained by our Oracle PeopleSoft system.
Madison APPO will modify External Requisition, Encumbrance, Purchase Order and Accounts Payable processes at UW-Madison in order to
- create UW-Madison Purchase Orders and encumbrances in the UW System Shared Financial System (SFS)
- pay UW-Madison invoices against Purchase Orders via checkwriting processes in the SFS
- link payment, encumbrance and PO information for UW-Madison into WISDM
- Collect data elements required to implement the Grants portion of SFS.
These changes will help the campus move all payment transaction processing to a single coding system, rather than having some transactions requiring legacy Class coding and some using account coding. We will have more and better data available in WISDM about encumbrance, PO, and payment transactions. The change will also eliminate the institutional risk associated with running outdated mainframe processes.
Change poses challenges as well. For example, the changeover period from July 2007 to January 2008 may be confusing to some. Both legacy and SFS coding will be in use along with a slightly modified external requisition process, before full SFS implementation. Users will also have to switch to generate encumbrances by the creation of a PO in SFS instead of the point of requisition entry in the Dean’s Office. Changes in closing out and reducing encumbrances may also pose challenges. Finally, users will need to determine how to make departmental requisition systems function with centrally-developed changes.Who will use it?
- Financial Managers and Divisional Business Representatives (DBR’s) in the Dean’s Office
- People who currently use mainframe accounting transactions such as EPRQ, INQR, GENR, etc.
- Requisition preparers – people who prepare paper external requisition forms
- Departments who have their own internal software system to help manage their purchase orders, encumbrances and payments
- People who monitor departmental or divisional budgets
Timeline
- July 2, 2007: Implementation of first POs in SFS
- July 9, 2007: Begin paying invoices in SFS
- July 16, 2007 Rollover of FY7 encumbrances to FY8 in SFS
- January 2008 (for Program Release): Collect data elements required by Grants and implement new external requisition generator.
The project contacts for APPO are Mike Hardiman mhardiman@bussvc.wisc.edu and Jan Richardson jrichardso@bussvc.wisc.edu.
To see how the APPO implementation affects UW-Madison business processes, go to Business Process Changes in the 2008 Program Release.