This page is intended to give an overview of the Cost Recovery process for lab managers, i.e. those who have direct knowledge of the use of one or more lab areas and who are responsible for reviewing charges those areas.
Cost Recovery Home
When you first log into Cost Recovery, you will see a list of billing periods, including the current billing period and the two previous billing periods. You can also view billing periods further back by using the Other Billing Period feature.
Most likely, you will more often be going to the billing period that is over and for which processing of charges has not been completed (March 2011 in the example above). This is where you will go to review charges for your lab area or areas. If you choose the current billing period, you can go to Monthly Charges To Date to view the charges for this billing period. Other options are disabled until the billing period is over. For details on the Monthly Charges To Date report, see that section further down on this page.
Billing Period Status
When you click on a GO button for a billing period above you will then see the home page for that billing period. The billing period home page represents one billing period (i.e. one month). The first section of the billing period shows the status of the billing period.
In this example, the billing period is still in process (i.e. charges have not been billed yet). Also, the Coral facility review is not completed. That means that there are lab managers who have not reviewed their charges yet.
Tasks
The next section is for tasks. If you are a lab manager and you have not completed your review, you will see the Manage Coral Charges - Facility Review task with the green GO button enabled. This section will also tell you which lab or labs you are authorized to review and whether or not they are completed. You can click GO to review charges. This will take you to the Review Coral Charges page.
Reviewing Coral Charges
The screenshot above shows the review charges interface. This page shows the imported Coral charges for the current billing period for lab areas you are authorized to review. In addition to several columns providing basic information about the charges, the charges table provides three additional columns:
- Override: Text in the override column for a given charge indicates that some property of the charge was modified during the cost recovery review process -- as lab manager most likely a change you made. The text should provide an explanation as to the nature of the change. You might make changes because of some specific knowledge regarding a specific charge. This could include:
- Information gathered from the comments entered by the user when the charge was incurred. These comments also appear in the charges table.
- Information communicated directly to you from the user.
- Knowledge of lab procedures that allow the you to spot errors in entering charge information.
- Action Required: Text in this column indicates that there is an action required record created for a charge, which means that the fiscal staff need to take some action regarding the charge. As lab manager, you might create such a record if you know adjustments need to be made to a charge, but you don't have all of the information required to complete the change.
- Action Completed: Text in this column indicates that the required action has been completed. This would usually be entered by the fiscal staff officer once they have resolved the issue specified in the Action Required column and would not normally be filled in during the facility review.
To make changes or create an action required record for a charge, click on the arrow at the start of that row. That will open the following dialog box.
Making Changes to Charges
You can provide new values for Process Units (process units reflect the cost of a charge, for your department there will be a specific value by which this number is multiplied to determine the final dollar cost), Wafers, Member, Organization, and Cost Object Number. These values will be saved and used when charges are actually billed. The original values are still saved and a record of your change is created in the database. If you wish to have fiscal staff take action on the charge, enter text in the Action Required field. As a lab manager you would not normally enter any value for Action Completed. As another option, Coral charge data can be downloaded (Download to Excel) and changes can be made within Excel. Then these changes can be uploaded (Upload Changes). Review the upload page before starting changes in Excel as there are special instructions on that page regarding how to make edits.
Completing the Review
Once you have completed your review, you should click on Finish Lab Area Review. You will see a form that looks something like this:
You can select one or more lab areas to mark as completed. Once you have done this for a lab area, the fiscal staff can go in to deal with any action required records you have created. And once all lab areas have been completed, they can complete the billing period (i.e. submit charges to SAP, send out invoices, etc.). As a lab manager, once you have completed reviewing all lab areas for which you are authorized, you are done with your responsibilities for that billing period.
Reports
The reports section of the billing period home pages shows you the reports that you are authorized to view. Some reports are not available depending on the status of the billing period, those reports' icons will be greyed out.
Monthly Charges to Date Report
This report shows all charges for the billing period, and unlike the other reports, it can be viewed any time during or after the billing period, providing a "current snapshot" of the charges to date. The data for this report is updated each day just after midnight, so charges for the current day will not be shown. This report is displayed as a Web page in the Cost Recovery application, and the report allows for filtering, grouping, and sorting of charges, where the displayed charge values (dollars) are updated based on the current grouping and filtering. See the annotated screenshot below for details. This report has the following fields:
- Supervisor
- Lab Identity
- Charge Category
- Lab
- Cost Object
- Item
- Incurred Cost
- Actual Cost
Other Reports
The other reports are in Excel or PDF format and provide information about charges imported from Coral (available after the billing period is over, i.e. the first day of the month after that billing period) and final charges billed to MIT cost objects or external purchase orders (available once processing of charges is complete).