Salary Audit Exceptions for non-licensed teachers at Restart Schools

Restart schools have educator licensure flexibility regarding the hiring of non- licensed educators.  This flexibility can result in Salary Audit Exceptions for non-licensed educators.  If your district has Restart Schools with Salary Audit Exceptions related to licensure, please send an email to the salary analysts @ salary@dpi.nc.gov.  The salary analyst will manually certify the non-licensed educator salaries based on the voucher amounts.  There will not be a pay level assigned to the manually certified salaries in LicSal.

Changes to Processing LEA’s Adjustments

Starting with the October 2017 data file, DPI began using the MFR (Monthly Financial Report) file to post LEA expenditures monthly instead of the 60-byte Summary file.  The MFR file consists of your month-to-date (MTD) and year-to-date (YTD) general ledger (GL) balances.  DPI uses the YTD GL balances to update your expenditures to DPI’s MSA (Management Sciences America) general ledger system.  The YTD GL balances include all activity posted to your GL for the current Fiscal Year, which includes adjustment/refund transactions process through BUD (for LEAs still using BUD) or the LINQ Financial software.

With this change, LEAs will only need to send UTRs (Unit Initiated Transfers (Transfers w/in Same Fund)) if the UTR affects certified salary codes (affects DPIs Salary Compliance System).  UTRs for general expense items are no longer required.  You can just key a journal voucher to your general ledger (LINQ, SARTOX, or K12).

Please note if using the LINQ software, you no longer need BUD.  You will make your ‘BUD” adjustments and refunds using the LINQ software instead of BUD.  Please contact the LINQ Support Center if you have any questions regarding this new process.

Reminder: DPI drops all invalid account codes prior to posting the Monthly Financial Report (MFR) totals.  When the LEA corrects the expenditure account code on their general ledger to a valid account code, the MFR file will reflect the change the following month.  The corrected account code will then post to Management Sciences America (MSA).

As part of the monthly data file process, DPI currently includes a list of the invalid codes in the monthly Monitoring Letter and MFR Error Report.  Please note the zero-out process and per pupil process will not recognize any expenditure posted to an invalid account code.  LEAs must use valid account codes to report their expenditures.

For questions, please contact Roxane Bernard at roxane.bernard@dpi.nc.gov.

The School Business Systems Modernization (SBSM) Program

The School Business Systems Modernization (SBSM) Program Team is offering to pay for any LEA that would like to migrate from their AS400 to the “OS400” (iSeries) in the NCEdCloud.  Such a move would mitigate risk to the LEA associated with the AS400 platform going out of support next year.  

Mike Spano, Program Director for SBSM, needs to hear ASAP from any LEA that is interested so that the SBSM team can gather needed data and work with SAS, Inc. to lay out migration plans.  Interested LEAs should contact Dr. Spano at michael.spano@dpi.nc.gov or (919) 807-3616.  Dr. Spano will join next week’s Finance Officers’ Webinar to answer any questions you might have about migration to the iSeries.