Bursar Update - 7th August 2025
This week's email is coming a little early in this shorter working week because I wanted to give you an update on the 'failed budget check' transactions that are in limbo on the system.
The team has completed an analysis of a selection of these, and I am happy to report their positive findings with instructions on how to proceed. Of the sample analysed about 75% of these fails are due to incorrect instructions built into Workday. This faulty programming has been corrected now. 15% of the sample tested was for budget checks on research project accounts that should have gone to PIs and not Heads of School. The remaining 10% are genuine budget checks pauses where there is insufficient budget available on the relevant cost centres.
We now recommend the following:
- For cost centre fails that show ‘insufficient budget’ or ‘no budget’ in red, press submit, and they should go through.
- For cost centre fails that show ‘error’ in red, send them back to the requisitioner and ask them to resubmit as they are, and they should work.
- For project account fails, we are still working on these and will communicate with you in the coming day or so on how to deal with these.
About 10% of the total number will come back to you as a fail and that is where there is a genuine budget shortfall. As Head of School/Unit or cost centre manager, you should then decide whether to reject them or refer them to Finance Systems for a budget override and reject them.
Hopefully, this resolves this considerable issue but if you still have difficulties in your School/Unit, please get in touch with me.
Last week, Helen and I offered to visit any School or Unit that wanted to meet with us to discuss the problems you were having with Workday. The offer still stands and to date we have visited seven Schools and Institutes. All these visits were very productive, and we learned from every one of them. There were some common themes including the budget check problem outlined above. Another problem was that staff did not know how to find basic Workday reports to help them in their School and research account portfolios. As a result of this, we will circulate a guide with further contact details to help you navigate the following reports:
- An expenses status report by School/Unit
- A requisition status report
- A purchase order status report
- A summary report for research accounts by PI and School
- A cost centre report showing live actual spend v budget
Workday allows for report building to occur locally and is easy to learn to use. That said, I want to invest time in working with PIs and School/Unit administrators to design a suite of high quality reports that will serve the vast majority of needs. I believe the number of reports required should be limited but very effective. They will focus on the key information for budget holders, decision makers and their support staff. I am earmarking later in the year to do this as we have a lot of more pressing issues to resolve for now.
There are problems in restocking and issuing stock from our stores, particularly in the Conway Institute and the School of Chemistry. Today we are going to run a workshop to tease out the exact problems with staff in these areas and we will have our in-house leads at this plus KPMG in this workshop to devise a comprehensive plan to resolve these issues. Helen and I will also be participating in this.
We expect use of the system will rise significantly after next week. We are considering having a physical presence in each of our main buildings where staff can visit if they need an immediate response to a query. We need to plan the resource for this and will report further on the details of this next week.
Thanks,
David