Administering departmental accounts (Budget)
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Your secretary should regularly keep you appraised as to the status of your department budget. He or she does this using the SMRT (SUNY Management Resource Tool) software from SUNY systems administration, found at WWW.SUNY.EDU (click on Employee Services Login).
The budget consists of several parts. OTPS stands for “Other than Personal Service” and is usually the biggest part of your departmental allocation. You may spend this money on supplies, travel, service contracts, or general, i.e., other stuff. For example, faculty are entitled to have the department pay for the dues to belong to their professional organizations. OTPS money pays for that. Equipment, specialized books, subscriptions, etc. all come from OTPS, whether these expenses are for classes or for research. Faculty development, if not paid by grants, also comes out of OTPS and may be quite substantial if it involves conference travel or professional publication. Try to get the faculty to put in proposals for grants, both local and national to pay for their development to conserve your OTPS. The department should vote on a system for allocating OTPS for individual faculty development so there is a clearly defined and objective distribution method. This could prevent one or two faculty members from spending a disproportionate percentage of your OTPS and generating resentment among the other faculty.
The state’s fiscal year starts on July 1 so, in theory, your budget runs from July 1 to June 30. In practice, however, the Purchasing Office will inform everyone of a deadline date, after which they will accept no more purchase requisitions. Effectively, you can’t spend your OTPS after that date which typically is at the end of May. So you are restricted to recharges in June (see next section). Furthermore, sometimes the OTPS accounts are reclaimed by the College administration before that date. These are called “sweeps” and you may be caught with expenses but no OTPS if it is swept. There is usually very little notice of sweeps. Fortunately, they have become rare in recent years.
You cannot carry over money to the next fiscal year in any category. Don’t bother to “save up” for big-ticket items. If you don’t spend your allocation, it will not be added to the next year’s budget. So, get what you need prior to the last day for purchasing.
In addition to OTPS, you have five “recharge” sections of your budget. Once upon a time, recharge meant that you spent what you needed and the College would recharge that part of the budget when it was exhausted. Now you get a set amount, probably less than OTPS in the recharge sections. Once it’s gone, you are broke so watch that spending, too.
The recharge items are Storehouse, Telephone, Mail, Duplicating, and Automotive. When you get supply items from Stores, like pencils, pads, blue books, etc, Storehouse is the recharge line that gets charged.
Telephone is fairly obvious. You will get a monthly charge for each phone line in your department. When faculty (or anyone using the phone) make calls, you get charged for local and long-distance. Once a month you can check each line from telecommunications at http://www.oneonta.edu/admin/telecomm/default_departments.asp. You will need your department account number, which is the same one you use on purchase orders and a password, available from telecommunications (2577). You might want to monitor any phones in a public area or those phones used by graduate students to be sure they aren’t running up a big bill (no 900 numbers should be allowed).
The mail recharge pays for what College Mail Services charges you to send mail (duh).
Central Duplicating is the Print Shop. When you send handouts, exams, etc. over to the Print Shop for thousands of copies, you get charged for each one. It’s a lot cheaper than your department copy machine.
Automotive may be your biggest headache. You get charged per mile for the use of College vehicles. It covers gasoline and wear-and-tear on the vehicles. So when faculty take a state car to a conference 200 miles away, your Automotive recharge gets a bill for the miles. Field trips require College vans to take students to places other than classrooms. The educational value of a field trip is tremendous but the mileage charge for vans is much higher than for cars. Furthermore, the actual mileage figure changes. You will be notified when it does but you may not get the notice very far in advance. However, you still need to reserve vans and cars well in advance so that may be a shock when the mileage rate increases on trips your faculty haven’t taken yet. It’s tough to plan the Automotive recharge for a whole year.
Fortunately, when you start running negative balances in any of the budget categories, you can shift allocations from one of the others to cover it. You can even move money from OTPS into one or more of the recharge accounts and vice versa. Your secretary will need to get the Dean’s permission to do that and the actual move is done by the Provost’s secretary so she needs to be copied. This assumes you haven’t spent everything in all other categories. That’s why you need to manage your department’s spending.
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