The Fund is about the Source of Money and associated spending restrictions
Required = Yes, for all transactions
The Fund segment of the FOAPAL represents the type of money that is being used. Different sources of funding (E&G, Grants and Contracts, Capital Budgets, Restricted Endowments, etc.) have different rules for what can be done with the funds and how they are reported to the Commonwealth and as a part of the Financial Statements. To manage compliance with these rules, different Fund Types are used. Fund Types include, but are not limited to:
- Education & General (E&G)
- Carryforward
- Auxiliary Enterprises (AE)
- Externally Sponsored Research Grants & Contracts
- Financial Aid
- Indirect Cost Recovery
- Capital Projects
Within a Fund Type, there can be multiple individual funds for specific purposes. Some funds are general and will be used by a broad range of departments. For instance, the E&G general fund is used by all academic units and most administrative units for their primary operational activities. Other Fund Types are subdivided with a hierarchy to categorize numerous project-specific unique fund codes. New funds will be established when the funding must be reported separately and balances must be tracked without regard to the university’s fiscal year. For example, Grants and Contracts, and Capital Projects require reporting on each separate source of funds, and therefore each grant or project will have its own fund number.
As a general rule, any funding source that needs to be tracked across multiple fiscal years should be a separate Fund. Banner’s functionality maintains separate fund balances (meaning the remaining balance from actual inflows and outflows carries forward from one fiscal year to the next) by Fund, but not by Organization. A common example would be grants/contracts where the lifecycle of the grant often does not align with the university’s fiscal year or Indirect Funds where the balance accumulates over multiple years.
Level 3 Funds will correspond within their fund types to the Cardinal (commonwealth) reporting system fund codes and are identified with an attribute to facilitate reporting.
Level 5 Funds will be used to track balances shared by multiple organizations or departments such as main E&G balances in 10111, Auxiliary Funds, or Cross-Functional funding (see Cross-Functional Fund Principles for more details). Due to their shared nature, Level 5 funds will generally not have default values for other FOAPAL segments assigned.
Level 6 Funds will be created when the specific fund needs to carry a balance and have defaults for other FOAPAL segments assigned to it. These funds are related to a single department, and sometimes a single person (Indirects, Pool, startup funding). L6 funds may have a specific purpose, so their defaults are designed to override the defaults from an organization (for example, an organization whose program is instruction, but the program for the fund is research).