Department Accountant^tm

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Feature List
Sample Reports
User Comments
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Overview

Department Accountant is a multi-user, PC-based accounting system designed for administrators and accountants in small departments, centers, institutes, and research labs at colleges, universities and research hospitals. It is extremely affordable and easy to use, and is designed as both a financial accounting and a departmental management system. Emphasis is placed on maintaining up-to-date information and generating reports not provided by the mainframe computer systems used by general administration.

Highlights

Better control of account and project expenditures
Flexible, integrated, easy to read reports for both faculty and administrators
Project & encumber salaries and benefits
Track standing orders and special commitments
Create soft encumbrances
User-defined coding systems for tracking information unique to specific labs or departments
Server installations for multi-user access
On-line documentation, training and continuous user support

In its simplest form, Department Accountant is an excellent tool for balancing an individual account or all of a faculty member’s research projects. It produces easy to interpret report formats that have been used by thousands of researchers nationwide for tracking both personnel and non-personnel expenditures. We provide training with each installation to help you get up and running as quickly as possible. Most users have their system initialized/configured for their organization and their first account completely up and running with the software in just 2 or 3 hours.

Department Accountant is also a management system. It maintains university-defined accounts (funds), and user-defined cost centers for managing special commitments (such as faculty startup funds or internally sponsored research) within a department. In addition, personnel salary distributions are maintained for projecting and encumbering salary and fringe benefit costs. The resulting reports combine actual expenditures as well as future encumbrances for both personnel and non-personnel accounting.

Department Accountant includes data entry, reconciliation, report options, and on-line documentation. Help functions allow users to select account, cost center and object code information from look up files. Indirect cost encumbrances can be automatically calculated for grant accounts. Reports can be generated for individual or groups of accounts and cost centers. Breakdown reports provide detailed transaction information grouped and subtotaled by object lines.

Easy to read summary reports allow administrators and staff to manage grants, trust funds, state funds, revolving funds, clinical income funds and special commitments. These reports are available with budget, encumbrance, expenditure, and balance information. Salary distributions of employees currently paid from an account can be printed with the account balance. User-defined identification codes provide a third dimension to Department Accountant. These codes allow the financial management of projects or expenditures that use both accounts and special commitments.

Department Accountant can be installed on either a stand-alone computer or a local area network (LAN). When installed on a network, multiple accountants can perform data entry, reconciliation, and report functions simultaneously. If you have centralized account management, you can pull the balance for the entire department with a couple of mouse clicks.

Department Accountant is a valuable tool for management accounting. It provides reports for meeting future needs now.

Your purchase of Department Accountant includes a copy of the software, up to 3 hours of training via WebDemo and a year of technical support.

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Feature List

User friendly, easy to use
Includes multiple report formats
Supports unlimited number of accounts
Supports multiple account types (grants, state, clinical income, gift, etc.)
Supports unlimited number of transactions
Supports multiple transaction types (budget, encumbrance, expense, & income)
Supports distribution of transactions over multiple accounts
Supports multiple budget periods
Project and encumber salaries and benefits
Supports multiple fringe benefit rates
Supports salaried and hourly payrolls
Supports monthly and biweekly pay periods
Tracks multiple salary sources per employee
Tracks standing orders and blanket purchase orders
Automatic calculations of indirect cost (F&A) encumbrances
Tracks special commitments (faculty startup funds, internally sponsored research, book allowances, etc.)
Supports soft encumbrances
Reconciliation procedures
Network compatibility for simultaneous use by multiple users
Secure database
User-defined coding systems
Vendor codes
Includes user training
Continuous user support via phone and Internet
On-line documentation
Easy upgrade to Department Manager

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Sample Reports

Account Summary
Account Totals
Account Breakdown
Employee Salary Distribution
Projected Salary & Benefits

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User Comments

"Department Accountant makes my job a lot easier. It's great to use a program that's designed for universities, rather than trying to adapt to a cumbersome corporate accounting program (like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole). The primary advantages of Department Accountant are:

fringe benefits are calculated automatically
personnel info is entered only once, and FTEs can be spread over multiple accounts
all transactions for all accounts are entered into a single database, so you can look at the "big picture" as well as all the details
the reconcile feature allows you to make sure you are in balance with your institution's records

I wholeheartedly recommend IT Works' Department Accountant."

-Susan Merriman – Administrator, Department of Linguistics

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