Budget Management Support and Development

Support and development of Columbia's Financial Systems' Budget Tool.

Also known as FFE Budget Tool.

CUIT’s Financial Front End (FFE) Applications (and department link when created) team provides technical support and develops enhancements for the FINSYS Budget Tool, Columbia’s online tool for entering budgets after they have been modeled and created. You can learn more about the Budget Tool on Columbia's Finance website.

The Budget Tool facilitates creating, editing and approving budgets for the current fiscal year and the future three fiscal years for direct activity, transfers, payroll, and project life. It also provides the capability to download budget data and upload budget changes and additions via Excel spreadsheet for direct activity, transfers and payroll. Project life does not have download or upload capabilities. Budget Tool transactions that have been approved are automatically queued up and transmitted to ARC for processing in the next of eleven daily transmissions. The state of budgets at the time of transmission to ARC is held in the Budget Tool database and reconciled against posted ARC data, which is received by the Budget Tool in a nightly feed. Any discrepancies between the data from ARC and the data held in the Budget Tool are noted in reports to administrators.

Administrative Access Roles

In order to use the Budget Tool, the user will first need to apply for access on the Financial Systems Security Application. The user will need to apply for the appropriate level of access:

  • Inquiry Only - Ability to view budget activity
  • Initiator - Inquiry + Ability to create, modify and delete budgets
  • Approvals (Preliminary or Final) - Inquiry + Initiator + Ability to approve budgets at varying levels
  • PAD Access - Ability to budget in the Payroll Module

For up-to-date information about the Budget Tool and Budgeting at CU please visit the Budget Management site.

Budgets are transmitted to ARC hourly from 10:00am - 7:00pm. The tool is available Monday - Sunday between the hours of 8:00am - 3:00am, except during maintenance periods announced on the Finance Service Center.

Guides/FAQ

  1. Navigate to the My.Columbia portal
  2. Sign in with your UNI
  3. Select the FINSYS Portal tab
  4. In the Financial Front End menu, select Budget Tool