The level of certainty has to be very high otherwise do not accrue. Be aware that the auditors usually run spot checks on income received in August and September against Year End income accruals.

Identify these in your batches going to shared services and mark as urgent.  Shared Services Finance (SSF) will accept internal trading invoices beyond the August deadline date, but whilst making every effort, cannot guarantee capture. Only send current year invoices during this time.

Departments have not taken appropriate action. There are a number of reasons why POs are still open, for example receipting was not carried out, or it may be a call-off order. The date, items bought, type of order, supplier etc should be taken into account before taking the appropriate action [1].

POs will have any committment removed and be closed to any further actions being taken. This includes receipting or matching of invoices. A finally closed PO cannot be re-opened.

From July, the report is sent out weekly to the nominated department finance contact, or if requested, the department generic inbox. If there is a more appropriate contact, the Helpdesk needs to be informed. For the rest of the year, these reports are sent out monthly.

It is for individual transactions. Please note that for all accruals, prepayments, income received in advance, if the total amount is £200,000 or more, all relevant paperwork should be sent to Central and Research Accounting.

It’s the primary validation that creates the accounting entry, delay in secondary approval does not change the accounting but it may delay the payment of the invoice. Please bear in mind that if invoices are amended after they have been secondary approved, the secondary approval process will need to be done again, even for paid invoices .

Central and Research Accounting will check for any items of £5,000 or more, and based purely on this, ask departments to verify whether it is an asset or not

For Research Grants that haven’t been set up by the Research Office, the Finance Division suggest using the departmental suspense award that is available to all Departments on the Grants Module.  The benefits of using the Grants Suspense account is that the expenditure gets included within the University’s Research Income and not reported as a General Ledger balance.  At the moment you can’t post salary costs directly to the research suspense account, but the Finance Division are looking at a solution.

At the year end the balance on the suspense account is cleared to departmental overhead account (EDAA).  Central and Research Accounting will be need to be notified by Departments of balances held on suspense accounts pending award set up by the Research Operations Office, so not to clear the balance down.

As at 31^st July 2019 AZZY balances held on the following transaction codes will roll into the reserves codes detailed below:

The Finance Division will look into getting a central repository of this information together and allow departments to have access.

PwC accept electronic copies of requested documents.  Usually samples are over the £10k threshold and Finance Division will hold a copy of Purchase Invoices.  Hopefully by September, we will have improved access to buildings to allow collection of paperwork.

Year End stock takes can be delayed until Departments have access to their buildings.  Once access is available we recommend a stock take is undertaken as a priority.

The Central and Research Accounting team will send some additional reports with the June Fixed Asset Register to allow make sure that your Fixed Asset Register is correct.  We will include a report detailing Additions and Retirements from the last completed review at the end of December 2019.

Guidance [4] is available on the Finance Division website regarding the tracking of Covid-19 costs. The ALBE source of fund can be in deficit at the end of the year and will be rolled forward.  The question as to whether shortfalls are met through additional allocations from Chest or by other measures will be determined at a later date, when we have a better idea of the duration and scale of the impact.

As preparation for the University's annual audit it is a requirement that departments submit a Cash Holding return detailing items such as advances, petty cash and float balances as at 30th June 2020. However with the current lockdown arrangements we are aware departments may be unable to achieve this by the deadline of 21 July 2020 as detailed in the FPM11, so the following arrangement should be made:

• When staff return to their departments, please complete the return as soon as possible at that time: PDF format form [7] / Word format form [8].
• Please mark the form with the date completed.
  Whilst the return will be as at 30 June we accept that in many cases this may represent the March 20 position when lockdown commenced and cash transactions ceased.
• Completed forms (including NIL returns) should be returned to the Finance Division and be marked for the attention of the Cashiers [9], preferably by email [9](with PDF attachment).

Please feel free to let us know as soon as possible if you are already aware of any discrepancies on advances, petty cash and float balances that you have not previously advised us on.

All the monthly payrolls are processed into Department Accounts and Research Grants by payment date of the payroll.  If the Finance Division is delayed in processing, departments will be notified through the usual channels.