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UCD Accounting Glossary

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Term	Definition
Account	The entity designated as the source of funds, or recipient of income, for a transaction. Account is a 7-digit field assigned by the organization to which it belongs.
Account Manager	An FIS user assigned to manage the activity in an account. The account manager is responsible for reviewing and approving financial transactions charged or credited to their account.
Account Number	A 7-digit number used in the Financial Information System to identify each revenue (income), expenditure (expense) or balance sheet account authorized in the accounting records. Account numbers are assigned by, and unique to, the organization to which they belong. The characters used have no significance to the FIS system.
Account Reviewer	Someone assigned to review transactions on an account and certify the validity of all charges and credits.
Accountability	An obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to furnish a justifying analysis or explanation for ones actions.
Accounting	A system for collecting, summarizing, analyzing and reporting, in monetary terms, information about an organization primarily for management purposes. Some requirements are established by law or directives of state and federal agencies.
Accruals	The fiscal recording of items pertaining to a current period which would not have appeared on the General Ledger until a future period in the normal course of payment or receipt of the items.
Advance End Date	Indicates the date at which an advance should be covered by another voucher/document.
Agreement	A contract duly executed and legally binding as affected by applicable rules of law. The university engages in commodity agreements and price schedule agreements.
Annotation	A term used in the General Ledger Review System, it is the selection of an icon appearing on the DaFIS DS Transaction Listing (2) report indicating the validity of the charge or credit. Payroll and indirect costs are excluded from annotation and review.
Annual Report Code (ARC)	The ARC is a 6-digit code assigned to every DaFIS account. It determines the account's function, school or college, and department. An example is 620100 - Public Service Graduate School of Management.
Appropriation	An amount allocated for expenditure. A sum budgeted for a department, unit or activity to identify a limit on the amount that can be expended under a particular account fund/sub budget.
Approval Authority	The authority, either by virtue of a person's appointment as department head or by redelegation to departmental representatives, to formally give permission to process a transaction. Account managers may or may not be the ultimate approval authority for a transaction. In cases where the account manager is not the ultimate approval authority, formal authorization for a transaction must be documented. See PPM 330-10 for details.
Asset	The term used for equipment/property owned by the university.
Asset Number	The number assigned to an equipment or theft sensitive asset. For assets acquired through calendar year 1999, the first pair of digits indicates the calendar year of acquisition. For assets acquired in year 2000 forward, the first four digits indicate the calendar year of acquisition. Following the digits designating the year, the next pair of digits indicates the campus which originally acquired the item. The last five digits are sequentially assigned by the original acquiring campus beginning with 00001, in each calendar year. For example, 973000001 represents the first item inventoried at UC Davis in January of 1997; a component for this asset would be represented as 973000001C.
Asset Representative	The asset representative is the DaFIS user assigned to and responsible for the physical inventory of the assets for a custodial code.
Attributes	Characteristics of an account or object that include, among other things, the purpose and description.
Audit	The examination of documents or records to determine the propriety, legality and accuracy of transactions recorded, or to be recorded, in accounts.
Auto-annotation	An annotation that automatically occurs when separation of duties requirements are met within DaFIS (e.g., the document initiator and approver are not the same person and the document has not been significantly modified in routing).
Auxiliary Enterprise	Self-supporting activities which provide non-instructional support in the form of goods and services to students, faculty, and staff upon payment of a specific user charge or fee for the goods and services provided (e. g. ,Student Housing, Transportation and Parking Services). The general public may be served only incidentally.
Award	An award is an agreement between a sponsor and the university for support of research, scholarly or professional training, or public service programs related to research or to scholarly or professional training.