Labor Accounting Overview

Labor Accounting was created to provide a way for campus departments to charge payroll expenses to the General Ledger. The system allows users to allocate faculty and staff work efforts and graduate student stipends, salaries, and tuition support to Prime chartstrings (department, funds, programs, and projects). LA sends chartstring changes to the General Ledger on a daily basis.

Major Business Processes Managed in LA

Note: AY faculty and staff commitments are managed in Human Resources. They are displayed in LA for user convenience.

User Group LA Activities
Department and Central Office Users

Create and/or approve:

  • Funding distributions for faculty and staff (including biweekly salary).

  • Commitments and distributions for faculty summer salaries (FSS). View a Step-by-Step for entering Faculty Summer Salary.

  • Commitments and distributions for GS fellowship stipends, assistantship salaries, and tuition support. 

Distributions can be made 2 years into the future and a full year retroactively.

 

Principal Investigators (PIs)
  • Certify sponsored research project work efforts.  

  • Approve cost-transfer justifications for changes made to project distributions more than 90 days in the past.

The Office of Finance and Treasury
  • Generate “payables” for GS stipend and tuition support, and faculty summer salary for the monthly payroll process.

  • Process payrolls.

  • Implement manual corrections for Time Collection overtime and special payments.

  • Generate GS tuition support and benefits mapping.

  • Update Effort Certification dates.

  • Generate and send LA journals to the General Ledger daily.

Person Detail Screen

Labor Accounting classroom training will teach you how and when to add commitments and funding distributions for employees and graduate students. 

A report from person detail in Labor Accounting System.

Effort Detail Screen

The Effort Detail Screen is where principal investigators (PIs) review and certify work efforts on their sponsored research projects. Departmental grants managers work with PIs to review and certify sponsored research project effort on a regular basis. The Sponsored Research Accounting Team initiates and monitors the certification process.

Federal requirements regarding proper internal controls on grants and contracts require effort certification by principal investigators (PIs) to ensure salaries and wages charged to federal awards are commensurate with the work performed. See the Sponsored Research Accounting section for additional information about SRA’s accounting practices.

Screen shot of the Effort Detail page in the Labor Accounting System

 We also provide a set of quick reference cards, called Labor Accounting Basics, to help you use Labor Accounting on a day-to-day basis.