From Old to New: IFIS to Oracle Transition

As we make this major transition to a new financial system, it’s important to make sure we close out IFIS accurately. Most of you will be closing out FY20 financial activity in IFIS, our legacy system, through July 10 for Prelim and July 17 for VC Cutoff.  See ledger cutoff dates here. 

This means you’re going to be working in two systems for a few weeks. An accurate close in IFIS is important for several reasons. It will close out our historical financial activity in IFIS, leaving accurate data for future reporting and audits and will also ensure we forward accurate balances into Oracle. It’s vital to start off with accurate and fully reconciled data in Oracle. Your attention to a good fiscal close in IFIS will help tremendously as we make the transition to Oracle.

IFIS General Ledger Balances to Oracle

One of the early and major decisions in our Oracle design was to keep the transition of legacy data as simple as possible. We decided to leave transactional data in IFIS and not bring it forward into Oracle primarily because we have a completely new chart of accounts. Translating detail from IFIS to Oracle would have been extremely complex and risky. To keep the transition simple we are only transferring balances forward into Oracle and we’re only going to do it once, on August 10 (give or take a few days). Why only one time and why so long after go live? Well, we decided that making multiple exchanges of balances data would risk confusion and mapping errors. Doing a balance transfer once, after campus June 2020 final close, gives departments one set of data to review and confirm as starting balances in Oracle. 

So, what does this approach mean to you? You won’t see any of your carryforward fund balances in the Oracle general ledger until mid August, after final campus close. As a result you’ll be relying on your closing balances in IFIS to inform your available resources. For Capital and Sponsored projects, the cumulative budgets will be available at go live, but the cumulative expenses from inception to date will not be in PPM until mid August. We understand this impacts your workload in the early days but believe it will also relieve effort to ensure your balances only need to be reconciled one time.