March

Contents
1. Brown Bag Lunch Wednesday April 16
2. Payroll@mit.edu Inquiries Now Logged in a Request Tracker (RT) Queue
3. Late Change to Salary Allocation Requests Now Also Logged by Request Tracker
4. New Process to Upload Spreadsheet Data into SAP to Assist with Department Financial Planning
5. Contact Information – When You Need Help

1. Brown Bag Lunch Wednesday April 16
There will be a Brown Bag Lunch, Wednesday April 16, 12:00 - 1:00pm, in the Mezzanine Lounge, W20-307. The agenda includes the monthly VPF HR/Payroll update, a demonstration of enhancements to SAPweb journal vouchers, and a demonstration of a new process for uploading data from a spreadsheet into SAP to assist DLCs with financial planning.

2. Payroll@mit.edu Inquiries Now Logged in a Request Tracker (RT) Queue
In recent months, a payroll managers’ team in the Payroll Office has been working to improve the process for responding to questions to payroll. Team members include Gillian Emmons, Charlotte Watson, Leslie Wright, Terrill Gadde, Jim Thompson, Linda Lancaster, and Judith Stein (facilitator). We would also like to thank Steve Turner in IS&T for his advice and assistance in configuring and setting up both of our new RT queues - payroll and late salary distribution change requests.

Our goal is to make sure that every question is answered quickly and accurately and no question is lost. To help us in the effort, email to payroll@mit.edu is now being logged in a Request Tracker (RT) queue. RT is the ticket-tracking system used by IS&T’s computing help desk and by many different organizations within MIT for tracking questions and reporting problems.

To reduce the volume of email sent to the community, the Payroll RT queue will not send an automatic reply when an email question is received. However, when the Payroll Office replies to an email inquiry, the RT ticket number is shown in the subject line. See example below.

From: Linda Lancaster via RT [mailto:payroll@MIT.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 8:11 AM
To: charlot@mit.edu
Subject: RE: test [help.mit.edu #599800]

The Payroll Office’s RT queue began logging email inquiries on March 24, 2008. As of Monday, April 7, we had received 255 inquiries, 177 of which had been responded to and resolved. As a reminder, Payroll@mit.edu is where to send questions on topics such as:

• Tax forms (W2, 1042s) and Tax Treaties
• Timesheets
• Vacation and Sick balances
• Salary Distribution
• Suspense Accounts
• Wage and employment verification requests
• General payroll questions

To ensure that your inquiries are logged, we ask community members to send inquiries to payroll@mit.edu instead of to a specific individual.

All questions regarding academic appointments, hourly student positions, graduate student appointments and employee transactions should continue to be sent to hrpayservicecenter@mit.edu.

At certain times of the academic and calendar year, payroll receives a high volume of inquiries. We are pleased to have this new tool to help us manage the volume of inquiries so that we can provide the best possible service to our large and diverse community.

3. Late Change to Salary Allocation Requests Now Also Logged by Request Tracker
Starting on April 1, 2008, tracking of late salary distribution change requests also moved to RT. The email address for submission of requests - cao-rg@mit.edu - has remained the same. The only differences visible to the community are:

• Numbers are now assigned to their requests by Request Tracker
• Request Tracker notification messages let the submitter know when their request has been received and assigned a number, and when their request has been approved and submitted to payroll.

The Request Tracker queue will enable us to provide service more efficiently to the community.

4. New Process to Upload Spreadsheet Data into SAP to Assist with Department Financial Planning
DLCs may now upload financial data into SAP from a single spreadsheet to create department financial plans for one or more cost objects for the current and up to 5 additional fiscal years. A benefit of having departmental financial plans in SAP is that DLCs will be able to run SAP and/or Data Warehouse reports on their plans, combining SAP actual expenses with the department’s planned expenditures. DLC administrators who wish to create financial plans for projects in SAP with more detail than the authorized total may also find the new upload function useful.

Each department has an assigned plan version which they may populate with uploaded data.
Please contact business-help@mit.edu to find your department’s 3-digit plan code and to request authorizations for SAP financial planning transactions.

A quickguide for how to upload a departmental financial plan into SAP is at: http://controllers.mit.edu/general_ledger_operations_reporting/policies_procedures/departmental_financial_planning.

If you are interested in learning more, please come to one of the demonstrations below or contact Magdalene Lee at mcnlee@mit.edu or Ying Liu at liuying@mit.edu

• Accounting Lunch- Monday, 4/14 – 12:00 noon – 2pm - Room NE47-189, 500 Technology Square - first floor
• Brown Bag Lunch – Wednesday, 4/16 - 12:00 noon – 1pm – Mezzanine Lounge, W20-307
• Data Warehouse User Group – Thursday, 4/24 – 1:30 – 2:30pm – Grand Cayman Room NE49-3100

5. Contact Information – When You Need Help