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Changing Fund Numbers on DaFIS Accounts

The OP Fund is a five-digit number representing the source of funding for an account. A list of all the valid fund numbers can be found in the OP Fund Number reference table . Each OP Fund Number also has a title and a sub-fund group, which help to further describe the fund source. Several problems arise when an existing account has its OP Fund Number changed, which can lead to reporting problems for the department, and lengthy research and cleanup for Accounting.

Some of the most common reasons why OP Fund numbers are changed include:

1. New funding in a different OP Fund Number
   You may be told that the funding for your program is now in another fund. While it is tempting to keep the old account, and change the fund number, you should correctly create a new account under the new fund. You may be required to make cost transfers from the old account to the new account, if you have incurred costs in the old account. Contact the DaFIS Help Desk to determine how to proceed if you need assistance.

2. Error in Current Budget document
   If you are transferring funds between accounts, using a Current Budget (CB) document, you may see the message "Debits and credits for sub fund group sub-fund short name must equal each other." This indicates that you are trying to transfer funds between accounts that do not have the same OP Fund Number. Since this is an inappropriate transfer, you should not change the OP Fund on one of the accounts just to process the CB. Contact Resource Management and Planning to determine how to proceed.

3. Templating an account
   Accounting & Financial Services no longer recommends "templating" for non-extramural accounts when creating new DaFIS accounts. Users sometimes forget to input a new account number and then mistakenly change the fund number on the original account. This leads to the out-of-balance scenario described below. (See "Account Templating on the Account Maintenance Document" in the Fall 2001 issue of DaFIS Notes for more details).

4. Incorrectly attributed OP Fund
   The only acceptable time to change an OP Fund on an existing account is when the wrong OP Fund was used when the account was created and there have been no financial or budgetary transactions on the account.

Changing the OP Fund Number on your DaFIS account can adversely impact it by creating one or more of following situations:

1. OP Funds will not be in balance
   For example, the results of changing the OP Fund Number from 19900 to 19980 on an account that has a budget balance of $1000 credit:
   • OP Fund 19900 will become out of balance by $1,000 debit
   • OP Fund 19980 will become out of balance by $1000 credit

   Accounting & Financial Services (A&FS) spends a lot of time identifying and fixing this common problem. Adverse implications of funds that are not in balance include:

   • Evaluating and adjusting the fund will be difficult as you may not be reviewing all the accounts in the fund, which could erroneously lead you to increase or decrease your account.
   • Increasing the chance of spending or saving money that belongs to another fund
   • Increasing the chance of making financial decisions with incomplete or inaccurate information

2. Inappropriately changing the sub-fund group
   In the example above, OP Fund 19900 has a sub-fund group of GENFND (General Funds) and OP Fund 19980 has a sub-fund group of GENICR (General Funds-Indirect Cost Recovery), respectively. By changing the fund, you are also changing the sub-fund group, which can result in inappropriately allowing or disallowing certain transactions to be recorded in your account.

3. Incorrect data in Decision Support
   An account's attributes are frozen every month, so you would end up with a different OP fund and sub-fund group in consecutive months. Changing the OP Fund number on an account makes it very difficult to perform analytical review or historical comparisons between fiscal years or even fiscal periods.

As you can see, the impact of changing the OP Fund on an existing account can be significant. It goes beyond the effect it has on your own deaprtment. So, save yourself and others unnecessary clean-up time and do not change the OP Fund on your existing accounts. Please contact General Accounting if you have any questions.