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OHIO BOARD OF REGENTS |
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OHIO BOARD OF REGENTS |
In HEI, a decision was made to organize course enrollments around Subject Codes rather than Programs. The Subject Codes reflect the subject matter of the courses rather than the source of funding.
This decision left open the question of how to organize the expenses that are currently reported by Program in Schedule 5. These are generally considered to be the "departmental" expenses.
There is general recognition that there is much variation in the departmental organizations of campuses. Some campuses teach CIS in the math department; others have a separate CIS department. Some campuses have all graduate assistants organized in a single department, at least from a fiscal standpoint; others show them as allocated to the various academic departments. Some campuses have three layers of organization units, i.e., campus, college, and department; others have just the campus and departments.
The decision of how to organize their Funding Unit Expense (FX) file, which replaces Schedule 5, is left to the individual campuses. This is done in the interest of minimizing the amount of aggregating and prorating that campuses need to do in the translation of their own financial records to the Regents financial reports. However, certain guidelines will aid the campuses in providing Funding Units which are consistent with the cost allocation process used by Regents, called Resource Analysis.
The following description of how Resource Analysis (RA) will allocate the costs in the Funding Unit Expense (FX) file to the various Subject Codes and Levels of instruction is intended to provide these guidelines.
First, the salaries of all instructors are linked to the one or more Funding Unit(s) from which the instructor is paid. In RA, this salary is allocated to the Subject Codes and Levels related to the courses taught by the instructor. Then these salaries are subtracted from the Funding Unit Expense (FX) file. Therefore, the instructor’s salary must not contain any costs which are not also included in the Funding Unit Expense (FX) file. Conversely, however, the Funding Unit Expense (FX) file contains many costs that are not carried in Faculty and Instructional Non-faculty Funding (FF) file, such as fringe benefits.
Second, all course sections are linked to the Funding Unit that provides overhead support for the course section. The remainder of the costs in each Funding Unit Expense (FX) record is allocated to the Subject Codes and Levels of the course sections linked to that Funding Unit.
Third, the remaining costs for those Funding Units which do not provide overhead support for any course section will be treated as campus level expenses. That is, whatever costs are remaining after the instructors’ salaries are subtracted will be rolled up in Resource Analysis to the campus level. From there, costs are allocated among all Subject Codes and Levels of courses offered by the campus.
Therefore, in general, we need a Funding Unit for the smallest organization unit that pays an instructor and/or provides overhead support for a course section. Normally, these will be what we think of as departments.
One case to avoid is the large organizational unit whose main function is not direct instruction, but which does in fact support a few courses. For example, consider the case of the Registrar’s Office which offers a course about registration techniques, or the college office which offers a course in an interdisciplinary field. We want to avoid allocating the presumably large costs of this unit to the Subject Codes and Levels of the few course sections they offer. In cases such as these, the instructional part of the larger unit should be reported as a separate Funding Unit.
Purely administrative units which neither pay instructors nor provide overhead for course sections, such as the Admissions Office, Physical Facilities, the Library, the Computer Center, or college offices should not be Funding Units. Their costs are primarily included in the campus level expense report where they can be reported in the proper cost category.
Funding Units appear in the Funding Unit Expense file (FX), the Faculty and Instructional Non-faculty Funding (FF) file and the Course Sections Taught (ST) file. They are identified with a 30 character name, instead of an identification number. It is important that they be consistently named in all three files, so that the files can be properly linked together.
The data in the Funding Unit Expense file (FX) and the Faculty and Instructional Non-faculty Funding (FF) file represent one complete fiscal year. Fiscal years run from July 1 through June 30, and include summer, fall, winter, and spring terms in that order. On the other hand, the Course Sections Taught (ST) file is reported on a term-by-term basis. We recognize that some course sections in the Course Sections Taught (ST) file for a summer term will reflect costs paid in the preceding fiscal year. We expect this inconsistency to be insignificant for our purposes.
Return to Meeting Notes, April 18, 1997
http://regents.ohio.gov/hei/RA/notes/fundingunits41897.html
Last updated August 19, 1997