May 2021 OBI Dashboard Enhancements

On May 4, 2021, the following enhancements were made to finance and human resources dashboards. 

On the Segment Lookup dashboard, detailed explanations of each function were added to the Function lookup page in a new column labeled FNC Long Desc (Function Long Description).  Task Org was added to the Project/Task lookup page. 

Three new fields were added to the PO Summary Dashboard:  Minority Owned, Women Owned, and EDGE Supplier.  These fields will be included in your results if you export the dashboard to Data CSV or Data Excel; or you may simply right click on the header column in OBI and add these fields through the “Include column” feature. 

On the Payroll Detail and Payroll Forecasting dashboards, a Compensation Type prompt was added that provides users with a simple method to view employee wages/salaries only or benefits only.  Previously if users wanted to view only wages/salaries or only benefits data, they had to limit their report through the payroll elements or object codes prompts, which required them to scroll through a long list and manually select each one they wanted to include.  This new prompt utilizes our object code hierarchy and offers three options to select from:

• Salaries/Wages Only – includes only payroll charged to object codes that fall under OBJ LVL C70000 SALARIES & WAGES
• Benefits Only– includes only payroll charged to object codes that fall under OBJ LVL C70900 BENEFITS
• All – this is the default selection; includes all payroll detail regardless of object code

On the Absence Management Dashboard, we recently discovered that planned/projected absence balances were not accurately reflected on the “Projected Balances for 6/30” view for any planned PTO that was in progress the day the report was run.  For example, if someone were midway through their 40-hour vacation and you ran an absence report while their vacation was in progress, the planned absence column did not include the 40 hours that were already in progress.  OIT corrected this report on May 20, 2021.  If you recently used this report to project out your team’s fiscal year ending PTO balances, it is highly recommended that you run this report again.  More information about the Absence Management dashboard can be found in the quick reference guide on the Finance website.     

Additionally, enhancements are underway to the Appointment Information and Costing dashboard and are expected to be completed in the next few weeks.  When this dashboard was initially created, we were able to report on historical payroll element data; however, we did not have that same ability to report on historical assignment data (i.e. costing, job, department, etc.).  As a result, the dashboard has mixed results of current data plus historical data, which has caused confusion.  Fortunately, we now have the capability to report on historical assignment data as well; therefore, we are modifying this report to accurately capture all appointment data as of the selected fiscal year.  We will communicate additional detail about this change and post updated quick reference guides on the finance website once the enhancements to this dashboard are complete.

Questions? Contact Finance Customer Care at financecustomercare@ohio.edu.