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The Berkeley Financial System (BFS), which is a customized version of the PeopleSoft Supply Chain and Financials product, consists of Accounts Payable, Procurement, General Ledger, and the Budget System (BIBS). A brief description of the functionality in each of these modules is given below. The BFS technical team as part of the PeopleSoft Unit is responsible for the development, customization, and maintenance of the BFS application.
Vendor Tracking and Maintenance: BFS serves as the central repository for recording and tracking all vendors doing business with the campus. In addition, the system also stores details on students and employees who need to be reimbursed.
Purchasing: The system provides comprehensive functionality to support the entire procurement process. The functionality implemented includes Requisition Creation, Online Purchase order creation, automated sourcing of Purchase orders from Requisitions, Contracts, Purchase order printing, receipts, and reconciliation. It provides the ability to track and monitor the entire lifecycle of requisitions and purchase orders.
Accounts Payable: The BFS application serves as the focal point for all disbursements (excluding scheduled paychecks) to external vendors, students, and employees. It also supports the payment of invoices for certain UCOP departments. The system provides the options to make available funds either through EFT or check, or through wire transfers in the case of international vendors. The pay-cycle, which is at the heart of the batch process, executes nightly. Withholding amounts are also calculated based on payment and vendor classification. It includes functionality to create reporting information based on these transactions and delivery of 1099 forms to vendors and corresponding information to the IRS.
Blucard: BFS also supports Blucard (ProCard) functionality wherein designated individuals/departments are provided with corporate credit cards to make specific types of purchase transactions. The system provides for the upload of these transactions into BFS for their subsequent verification and payment. The system is currently being enhanced to support processing of an additional card type called the Event Planner card.
General Ledger: This module serves as the core of the Berkeley Financial System. It is seamlessly integrated with the Purchasing, Accounts Payables, and BIBS subsystems. The General Ledger provides for the creation of journals (internally or received from the subsystems), import and processing of journal entries uploaded from spreadsheets, maintenance of ledgers (detail/summary), creation and processing of allocations, the closing of ledgers, the consolidation of financial information, and the generation of statutory, federal, and internal reports. The Chart of Accounts for UC Berkeley is maintained and updated via this module.
Berkeley Integrated Staffing and Budget System: The BIBS module manages the budgeting needs for the campus. It uses separate ledgers within the General Ledger module to track information on the both the Permanent Budget (funds committed annually from the State of California), and the Temporary Budget (the yearly operating budget which consists of the permanently budgeted funds and more than a billion dollars in Temporary funds contracts, special awards, and research grants). BIBS also the Position Resource Tracking system. The PRT, a custom module within BIBS, maintains the salary portion of the Permanent Budget. The PRT system is updated by nightly feeds from the HRMS system, and automatically updates the Permanent Budget for many salary adjustments, including Merits and Ranges. Automated allocations from these Permanent Budget adjustments are transferred monthly to the Temporary Budget balances of the departments.
Interfaces to other systems: BFS has interfaces to other UC Berkeley application systems such as Student Information Systems, HRMS, Payroll, Billing, and Payments, as well as to smaller subsystems such as the Berkeley Equipment Tracking System (BETS) and the Travel and Entertainment Expenses system. It also supports numerous interfaces to external entities, banks, and UCOP, to provide and receive various kinds of invoice and payment financial information.
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