Disbursement Services Updates: Enhancements/Refinements

We are excited to announce a number of system enhancements and refinements for each of the Disbursements teams. We have been partnering with our colleagues in Administrative Systems Management to implement these refinements. The changes are scheduled to move to production on Tuesday evening, November 11, 2014.  We hope that these enhancements will provide additional efficiencies for your departmental business processes.

Corporate Accounts Payable

• All required fields, with the exception of the cost distribution, will now be identified with a red asterisk.
• The date format used in the workflow comments will be changed to the standard and more familiar format of MMDDYY. This will replace the European format DDMMYY.
• The electronic form currently allows a submitter to request both payment by wire and check available for pick-up. The options will be mutually exclusive, and the submitter will be allowed to select only one.
• The form will no longer allow a submitter to enter both an SSN and an EIN for the payee. The tax identification number is now mutually exclusive, and the submitter will be allowed to enter only one.

Corporate Payroll Services

• In the efforts to manage the student payments for tuition remission more effectively, new edits have been included in the Hire, Transfer, Rate and Schedule, Cost Distribution, and Manual Salary Cost Transfer iForms to ensure the following:
  • Service type/service categories 6012 and 6042 can be used only for graduate students who are in job code 1590. Please note that job code 1590 can be used for other student service type/service categories as well.
• If an iForm is left open and is inactive for a period of 10 minutes or greater, the browser will be redirected to a page that displays the following message: Your iForm expired due to inactivity.Please close the window and try again.

Employee Travel & Reimbursement

• The email notification distributed to each approval level has been enhanced to include detailed information. Examples include funding sources, expense type details, mileage, per diem, along with comments recorded throughout the process. Please note that the fields for per diem and mileage will reflect zero dollars when there are none included in the expense report. These refinements should facilitate the approval process and minimize the need to use the PDF Summary report.  Approvers should continue to review receipts during the review process.
• A new reminder message will be included on each of the steps to prompt initiators to attach receipts when preparing expense reports. The message will be displayed in red font as follows: Please remember to add your receipt attachment.

WBS Element Warning Messages

In efforts to facilitate more timely close out of grants, the Office of Sponsored Programs, Administrative Systems Management, along with partners in the eRA Closeout Initiative have introduced new warning messages to a number of the Duke@Work portal tools. These messages will be triggered when the funding sources recorded in the applicable tools have end dates.  Examples of the upcoming messages are included below. If you have questions about these specific messages for any of the tools, please contact the Office of Sponsored Programs at 684-5442.

We appreciate your partnership and support as we continue to identify opportunities for business process changes along with technical efficiencies.

If you have any questions or need additional information, the contact information for each of our Disbursements teams is included below.

• Corporate Accounts Payable
  • Customer Service Number: 919/684-3112
  • Customer Service Email for Electronic AP Check Requests:  APonlinecheck@duke.edu
• Corporate Payroll Services
  • Customer Service Number: 919/684-2642
  • Customer Service Email:  payroll@duke.edu
• Employee Travel and Reimbursement
  • Customer Service Number: 919/668-3877
  • Customer Service Email:  OnlineTravel@duke.edu