Enterprise Services Automation (ESA) is a group of PeopleSoft modules that includes Project Costing, Grants Management, and Customer Contracts. Agencies that have started using ESA are considered to be “Onboarded” agencies.

Onboarded Agencies:

• Establish their own Federal Grant Projects, Customer Contracts and Awards in SFS
• Have their Projects and Customer Contracts under their own agency PCBU
• Use the Commitment Control in SFS to budget for Federal Grant Projects
• Utilize funds distribution functionality (See Section IX.4.A) in Project Costing to split expenditures systematically for Federal and State share of costs.
• Are required to set up Funds Distribution to determine what charges will go through the Federal Billing Process (See Chapter XIV, Section 15.E of this guide on how to set this up in the Project Guide)
• Interface LATS information into SFS

Once an onboarded agency’s Customer Contract, Grant Award, Project, and Activities have been established in SFS and Project Budgets are created, agencies are able to start spending against the project. As expenditures are recorded against the projects, those transactions will get collected into the Project Costing (PC) module. Once the contract is in ACTIVE status, the billing process is initiated. General ledger journals and expense reports will flow to billing upon collection while AP Vouchers will wait for payment date to begin billing. There is a two-step billing approval process before expenses can be drawn.

Step 1) Manager Transaction Review. For all agencies, the default setup at the Customer Contract level is auto-approval. Agencies can choose to manually review transactions, but given the high volume of transactions, this is not a recommended option. Once approved, these transactions will create temporary bills in PC.

Step 2) Bill Approval. As part of the project setup process, agencies designate whether a contract’s bills will be manually or automatically approved.

Manual Bill Approval

As a general rule, OSC expects Agency staff to approve bills in a timely manner to facilitate proper reimbursement of state resources. Agencies access the Manage Billing Worksheet screen to select the bills they want to approve for reimbursement. Approval can be done using “Approve Now” or “Approve Later” functionality. When large amounts of bill lines are being approved, Approve Later must be used in order to avoid system resource issues. The use of Approve Later also requires an additional step of Processing Worksheet Approval.

After approval, the system creates actual bills ready to be invoiced. Agencies must also run a single action invoice process to invoice the bills. Billing batch processes run to create the corresponding Accounts Receivable (AR) for the award. This AR amount then populates the drawdown worksheets. The drawdown worksheets are then used to process the drawdowns on the federal system. Once the funds are received, BSAO will post the receipt.

Automatic Bill Approval

After temporary bills are created, the system will systematically approve them which results in the temporary bills being converted to actual bills. The system will automatically invoice these actual bills which results in an outstanding Accounts Receivable (AR) for the award. This AR amount then populates the drawdown worksheets. The drawdown worksheets are then used to process the drawdowns on the federal system. Once the funds are received, BSAO will post the receipt.

Guide to Financial Operations

REV. 02/01/2022