Chart of Accounts home

Harvard's Chart Security Maintenance Application (CSMA), available from Harvard's Financial & Reporting Applications web page, is an easy-to-use, custom-built Oracle application for authorized Chart of Accounts (CoA) requestors.

CSMA lets authorized requestors request the following value changes in selected CoA segments:

• add new values
• modify existing values
• disable existing values, and
• re-enable values that have been disabled.

Use this site to get information on:

• Getting Access to CSMA
• Pre-Steps for Chart Maintenance Requests
• Making CoA Requests
• After Submitting Your CoA Request
• Troubleshooting

Getting Access to CSMA      back to top

CSMA is designed to let authorized requestors submit and review chart maintenance requests. Some of these requests must be reviewed and approved by departments in Harvard’s Central Administration. A number of requests must be manually loaded to Oracle by the Office of Applications Administration. The various roles and responsibilities associated with these activities are outlined in the CSMA Roles and Responsibilities document.

The mechanism for becoming a Chart Authorized Requestor (and for making changes to your profile once you are) is the Authorized Requestor form (for tubs other than 610 – CADM) or the CADM Authorized Requestor form (for tub 610 – CADM).

Based on the information supplied on your Authorized Requestor form, an Oracle responsibility will be created for you. For details on CSMA security, refer to CSMA Security Guidelines.

Pre-Steps for Chart Maintenance Requests      back to top

Before you log on to CSMA to submit a request, you first need to take a few steps in preparation:

• You will need to identify what value(s) you will be requesting. To do this, you may need help identifying what ranges of values are available to you (segment ranges by tub) or the values you already have and their status (enabled/disabled). For a listing of available values in your ranges, run the CREW Value Finder Report (under Listings), which marks unused ranges with an *, or the CoA Listing Report (also under Listings), which produces a list of values based on data in the values’ description or attributes.

• If in identifying the segment type and value you may need, you find that you do not have sufficient values in your existing ranges to make the request, follow the instructions in the Making Changes to CoA Ranges document to initiate a request for additional values.

• You may need to know where your child or parent value falls in a segment’s parent roll-up (especially important for new orgs, which must fall within the range of a super parent or CSMA will not allow the request). You can get a view of any segment’s hierarchy (except subactivity) up or down from any input value using the CREW Chart Hierarchy Report.

• Since all child orgs must be covered by an org-fund and org-activity cross-validation rule (CVR), you may need to run the CREW CVR Translator/ Reverser Report to find out what ranges of fund, activity, and root values may be used with your new org. If no data is returned by the report, it means your new org does not fall within an existing CVR. You will need to add CVRs that cover it before CSMA allows you to request the value.

• You may need to add new values to the picklist for one of the local attributes you have established. Follow the steps outlined in Making Changes to CoA Value Sets to complete the Chart Attribute Value Set Request form to either add a new value set, or add, modify or disable codes in an existing value set.

• Disabling values: Prior to submitting a disable request, you should have reviewed the Disabling Segment Values Guidelines document and executed all the pre-steps listed in the Pre-Disable Checklist for Tubs. Many of the steps listed in that document can be facilitated by consulting the output of the Disable Impact Summary or Detail reports, which may be accessed using your HDW-CSMA responsibility in CREW.

Making CoA Requests      back to top

Harvard’s chart of accounts has seven segments: tub, org, object, fund, activity, subactivity, and root (refer to ABLE's CoA main page for an explanation of these chart segments and their use, if necessary). Not all requests to make changes to these segments are processed through CSMA. Consult the Making Changes to CoA Value Sets document for information on how to effect changes in all chart segments and ranges.

For those requests that will go through CSMA, we have created a number of documents to supplement the work instructions as you submit your requests:

For detailed, supplementary information on each CSMA field, consult the CSMA Field Guide. The document lists each field by segment type in the approximate order you will find them on the CSMA screens.

The CoA Naming Conventions document provides detailed information on the formatting you should use in creating descriptions for your chart of accounts values, including special characters to avoid and standard abbreviations you should employ. The Description Change Rules outline Applications Administration’s policy regarding the “no change in purpose” rule governing approval of requests that change descriptions of existing segment values.

For information on requesting parent CoA segment values, consult Using Parent Values for an overview of CoA parents, or Parent Request Validations for the CSMA request requirements for each parent type (financial or allocation) and request type.

For batch users: Consult the CSMA Batch Templates and Ranges document for a list of the value types and ranges of values that can be submitted on each template, as well as any specific security restrictions that apply to it.

For fund requests: The Balance Forward Defaults by Fund Type document will help you determine whether or not it is necessary to populate the Balance Forward attribute for one of your fund values in order to have its year-end balances post to the level you desire.

For activity requests: Consult the A-21 definitions for help in determining the A-21 attribute for your other income statement activity requests. For balance sheet activity requests that will involve capital financing via the Office of Treasury Management, be sure to consult both the Debt-Financed Equipment Business Process and the Validation Rules for Debt Flag and Interest Rate Type Code on Activity documents.

After Submitting Your CoA Request      back to top

Most of your CoA requests will not require approval and will therefore be loaded to Oracle at the next scheduled sweep. For a list of those segment and request types that will require approval, consult the CSMA Approvers by Segment and Request Type document. The CSMA Routing document expresses these process flows in a more graphical format.

Requests that require approval, as well as requests that fail the month-end disable process, generate notifications within CSMA that either require action by a requestor or approver (response-type) or are informational only (FYI). Notifications must be acted upon using the CSMA Worklist feature.

Many notifications also generate informational e-mail copies. If action is not taken on a response-type notification within a specified period, all users associated with the CSMA responsibility to which the original notification was sent will receive an e-mail reminder that the request is still outstanding. These reminder e-mails are only meant to prompt a recipient to log into CSMA and take action on the request through the notification in their Worklist. They should never be used to communicate information related to the request back to approvers, as information transmitted this way does not get recorded on the request.

Troubleshooting      back to top

Throughout the life of your request, CSMA will reset the request status each time it moves forward through the routing process until it is either rejected, uploaded, or cancelled. The initial request status is set at the time it is either submitted or saved for later. The request status can be viewed any time thereafter on the Effective Date/Comments screen in Manage/View, as well as on numerous CSMA reports including the Request Detail report, the Value History report (both Summary and Detail) and the Batch Summary report.

The batch and non-batch error messages and alerts documents contain lists of all of the error messages you will ever encounter using the CSMA application, and tells you what these messages mean, what you should do to correct them, and where to go for more information. Of course, your best source of help and assistance is the UIS Help Desk at (617) 496-2001. For all other questions related to chart of accounts maintenance, please feel free to call your Applications Administrator.