Friday, April 23, 2021
The transition to WISEdata Finance (WDF) is officially underway! Vendors have begun onboarding their customers to the new system and business office staff are logging in. As a reminder, at present we are only looking for users to set up access and log in.
Funds
Districts that have added Funds 41, 46, or 73 in the past year or two may not yet see those accounts in WISEdata Finance. We are in the process of updating WDF for those districts. This does not affect districts approved in SAFR (PI-1504/1505) for using restricted funds. However, if your district recently approved use of Fund 41, 46, or 73, and you have not yet reported it to DPI, please follow up with Roger Kordus and Dan Bush.
Balances
Many districts have been asking about fund balance accounts. Information on the current GASB 54 fund balance accounts is available on our School District Fund Balance Policy page. Please note there is not a direct, one-to-one correspondence between “old” and “new” accounts. Users will need to determine the most appropriate GASB 54 classifications to use for their purposes.
Selecting a fund balance account for encumbrances or other internal software functionality may result in the local creation of invalid WUFAR account combinations. For example, if software requires a fund balance account to be used with encumbrances and the user selects 939000, it will create invalid combinations in funds that do not include balance sheet combinations with 939000.
WISEdata Finance will not accept local accounts with invalid combinations, but so long as the account is only used for encumbrances or other internal functionality that users resolve at year end (such as by closing out purchase orders) then it will not be a problem. Having invalid fund balance accounts for encumbrances or other internal functionality during the school year will not prevent the submission of budget and actual amounts.
Users will still need to close out year end as they have done, and WISEdata Finance will not begin validating whether funds are in balance among all account types (expenditure, revenue, asset, liability, and fund balance) until July 1.
Tags
The project/program tag was created to give districts the flexibility to continue using pre-established local project codes if they conflict with the DPI-specified project codes. Based on vendor and pilot feedback, we have added a new tag: LocalUse. This tag is used to identify project codes that have purely local purposes unrelated to any federal or state program, particularly for accounts where DPI-specified project codes are used for another purpose.
For example, if a district uses project 901 for Title I-A and project 141 for some other local purpose, then they would need to tag project 901 accounts with FedT1A and project 141 accounts with LocalUse.
LocalUse is not required if you are using the DPI-specified project codes. In this case the only Project/Program tags needed would be FedOther for federal grants from other state agencies, FedDirect for direct federal grants, or WisOther for state grants from other state agencies.
A full list of Project/Program Tags with an Excel export is available in WISEdata Finance under Account Reviews > Project/Program Tag.