UniFi modules

UniFi, UQ's financial processing system, is an Oracle PeopleSoft Financials product.

You must use UniFi to process and record financial data. This enables monitoring, administration and reporting (via the UQ Reportal) on core financial information to support budgetary management and control.

Contact Finance Client Support Services to discuss enhancements, integration or functionality requirements for UniFi. Technical enhancements are prioritised and planned each quarter. Finance and Business Services work closely with the Enterprise Support Systems team in IT Services (ITS) to prioritise and deliver technical enhancements.

Enterprise Systems Support are the system administrators. They:

review and update security for users
resolve workflow issues
investigate system functionality and provide best-practice solutions to functional areas
manage system updates, patches and fixes.

For a system diagram and other system information, see the Enterprise Financial Systems Procedures [9.20.21].

See the Current staff website for information about UniFi access, training and support, and workflows.

eProcurement

The eProcurement module:

is used for requisition entry
delivers decentralised procurement functionality throughout UQ
allows requesters to requisition items and services from suppliers, as well as select items from internal store catalogues or UQeMarket
provides requesters with the capability to receive goods and manage their own requisitions, including tracking the requisition through the lifespan of its procure-to-pay cycle.

The module has been configured to create an approval and checking process specific to UQ’s needs. This involves:

requisition checking
budget holder approval
commodity approval for IT and drugs.

Once a requisition is fully approved it is sourced into a purchase order.

Purchasing

The Purchasing module streamlines the procurement process through automated sourcing of requisitions and workflow approvals. While it is not standard business practice at UQ nor is it recommended for frequent use, this module has been designed to allow experienced Buyers to create purchase orders online.

The module is used to workflow purchase orders to a nominated financial delegate for approval before dispatching the document to the supplier. Like the eProcurement modules, the Purchasing module is used to receive goods in UniFi, which enables supplier payments, as well as integrate with the Payables module to perform invoicing and payment activities.

Accounts Payable

The Payables module:

enables invoice and payment processing to ensure timely and accurate payment for goods and services.
allows Finance and Business Services (FBS) to perform best-practice business processes, including matching purchase orders, receipts and invoices to identify exceptions and increase control over supplier payments
is used to generate Australian-dollar (AUD) payments via electronic funds transfer (EFT) and cheque, as well as foreign currency payments via wire and draft
is used to generate remittance advices to advise suppliers of incoming UQ payments, as well as allow Finance and Business Services the ability to create, approve and maintain supplier records.

Billing

The Billing module enables the processing of billing information to create invoices. UniFi billing processes include:

creation of bills and adjustments
receipt of billing from other modules
creation of billing accounting entries

Finance Officers or UniFi users are required to raise bills online. However, billing can also occur via an automated process for research projects through customer contracts. When bills are ready to be invoiced, the dispatch process runs and sends the invoice to the customer via email or print.

Accounts Receivable

The Accounts Receivable module allows for effective management of receivables by enabling the:

processing and tracking of all receivables
receipt and application of payments
management of outstanding receivables and disputes
effective management of payment disputes and conversations with customers.

Receivables integrate with these modules:

General Ledger: accounting entries are sent from Receivables to the General Ledger through the journal generator process
Billing: users enter invoices and adjustment notes in Billing and this interacts with Receivables
Project Costing: resource rows that are entered in Project Costing can be interfaced with Billing to create invoices, which then become items in Receivables when using the billing interface
Contracts: billing plan lines that are entered in Contracts are interfaced to Billing to create invoices
Grants: invoices can originate in Grants and then be interfaced through Contracts and Billing into Receivables
Payables: the refund process in Receivables adds rows to tables that are used by Payables to build a voucher.

Cash Management

The Cash Management module enables users to:

monitor and forecast cash requirements
perform automated bank reconciliations
distribute payments efficiently and securely
automatically generate accounting entries.

This module is mainly used to perform UQ’s book-to-bank reconciliation, comparing bank-reported balances in the bank statement to the system’s general ledger balances for a specific fiscal period. The reconciliation functionality integrates with:

General Ledger
Payables
Receivables
Treasury.

Grants

The Grants module enables the planning, management and tracking of project activities associated with research. It supports the full range of post-award processing, including:

tracking and management of the award
maintaining projects and activities in association with the award
managing award funding through budget administration and commitment control.

The award-generation process prepares awards for post-award management. This includes creating the contract, billing plans, and revenue recognition plans that are required for processing transactions for awards.

The module:

manages the proposal approval process through its life cycle
determines when milestones are due
sends notifications to the appropriate roles as needed.

Proposal Management

Contracts

The Contracts module allows for the creation and administration of contracts, including:

recording the financial terms and conditions of a contract
enabling automated bills to be raised according to the bill plans and milestones specified on the contract lines
recording how revenue will be distributed
amendments to contract.

Contracts controls the billing process for billing data that originates from Project Costing.

Project Costing

The Project Costing module is used for management of project costing activities, including:

recording project information such as start and end dates, and project statuses
defining contract billing associated to those projects through rate sets and rate plans
capturing project expenses
providing costs and expenses for billing and revenue recognition to meet financial reporting requirements.

General Ledger

The General Ledger module is the core component of UniFi. It integrates and reports on information taken from all UniFi modules. It is an integrated financial database that interfaces (interacts) with subsystem applications, such as Purchase Orders [PO], Accounts Payable [AP], Asset Management [AM], and Accounts Receivable [AR], along with other external systems.

The purpose of the General Ledger module is to accumulate summary account information from the subsidiary modules, as well as manual entries in the General Ledger. The detailed transactions entered in the subsidiary modules are summarised and interfaced to the General Ledger module via the Journal Generator, which creates the appropriate journals from the accounting entries and posts to the appropriate ledgers.

Each journal entry is comprised of a combination of chartfield values and monetary amounts that update the account balance maintained in the General Ledger. These interfaces then provide accounting, encumbrance, budgeting, inquiry and reporting capabilities. While journals and accounting information remains the fundamental component for users in UniFi, the General Ledger module is also used to maintain accounting trees and ledger details, and perform year-end closing tasks.