Introduction of Actualized Forecast & Simplified HCP project - changes coming soon & how to learn more

CalPlanning Community,

The VC Finance’s Financial Planning & Analysis team is implementing a set of CalPlanning enhancements for the FY2018-19 budget cycle which will actualize the FY18 Forecast by overwriting the working Forecast for closed periods with Actuals data in CalPlan and HCP. They will also simplify the task lists and action required in HCP to create employee compensation plans by replacing effective dates with periods to allow for updating employees by month. This will allow Planners to track activity to date, and to plan ahead, which will simplify compensation planning.

We’re sending you advance information now to help you prepare for the upcoming changes. The Actualized Forecast with everything but compensation data will go live in December 2017, and the Actualized Forecast including compensation data along with the HCP simplifications will go live in February 2018. Information about the project, including monthly updates, will be posted to the Actualize Forecast and Simplify HCP project page on the VC Finance website.

Actualized Forecast

With this change, data will be loaded monthly with distribution by entity and by CalPlan account, fund (details below), and chartfield1. For HCP, employee, and job code will be included. A snapshot of the Forecast data will be taken at the end of each month. The new Forecast version “PriorMonth” will store the previous month’s Forecast values for the entire year (all 12 months) which will be a combination of Actuals and Forecast data, so that Planners can compare variances between the Actuals and the prior month’s Forecast. Actualizing the Forecast will provide Planners with the ability to see the impact of activity to date and allow them to course-correct and plan for those corrections in the latter part of the year.

Change to Planning: Simplified at the Five Major Fund Buckets

Last year we simplified the tool by reducing the number of intersections of data available to plan to by fund: we removed all the individual funds and reduced the number of plan funds to 19. After conducting User Acceptance Testing with the Divisional Finance Leader (DFL) working group for this project, we determined that with the Actualized Forecast there were still an overwhelming number of intersections of data. For this reason, we are reducing the number of funds available for planning  even further - down to the five major fund groups. Planned data at any of the lower 14 planning fund buckets will be moved to the appropriate fund bucket when the tool opens in mid-December with the Actualized Forecast for everything but compensation. Planned compensation data will remain at the 19 fund types until it is actualized with the new February 2018 release. DeptID adjustments as well as pooled positions will be converted to the simplified fund buckets.

Simplified HCP

The project team is also implementing design changes that will enable the actualization of the FY18 Forecast in HCP with Actuals for compensation data, as well as requested improvements to simplify Planners’ experience with the tool. First, we will no longer use Effective Start and End dates to plan for an employee’s salary and benefit expenses: Planners will be able to plan at the period level and update employee regular pay rates and distributed expenses by month. In addition, we will simplify the process for updating salary, adding an employee, and planning for DeptID adjustments. These HCP design changes will not only support the Actualized Forecast process, but will also enable more frequent refreshing of data from HCM. This new way of “refreshing” will remove the necessity to overwrite future-dated rows.

Training Resources

We’ll offer CalPlanning classes, including CalPlan and HCP classroom training for newly-hired CalPlanning users, starting in January 2018. For our existing users, we’ll provide demonstrations of the Actualized Forecast in January 2018 and demonstrations of the simplified HCP in February 2018. We’ll send out a message with the dates and enrollment links for both the new hire training and the demonstrations in the next few weeks.

Questions

If you have technical questions about CalPlanning, please contact the Help Desk at calplanhelp@berkeley.edu. If you have questions about the Actualize Forecast and Simplify HCP project, please contact the project team at  dfl_concierge@berkeley.edu

Thank you,

Financial Planning & Analysis team

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Office of the Vice Chancellor of Finance