Make sure the new J-initiator software plug-in is installed on your computer.

Make sure that you have the Internet Explorer web browser on your computer.

Read through the key dates for the upgrade and plan your work accordingly.

View the online simulations that provide a tour of the system.

The paperwork for all approved web vouchers must reach Accounts Payable in Holyoke Center 370 by 5 p.m. All invoices received after this time will be posted in December. Any web vouchers not approved by this time will not be converted, and will have to be recreated after the upgrade. All invoices processed by Accounts Payable that come due between November 22 and December 2 based on their payment terms will be paid on November 22.

The Harvard Data Warehouse (HDW) and its related reporting systems will be available the week of Thanksgiving through Monday, December 2, with data as of November 22. All scheduled reports and request sets will be copied into the new Oracle 11i data warehouse and will not be lost. However, in preparation for the upgrade, all completed reports stored in the report status areas of AWS2 and HUDINI will be purged on November 23. Please print or save any reports you need to keep by 5 p.m. on November 22.

November 22 is also the last day that many central financial processing services will be available prior to the outage. Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, General Accounting, Applications Administration, and Travel and Reimbursement services (including Web Voucher Travel Authorization forms) will be suspended during the three business days before Thanksgiving. Please note that both AP Customer Service and Vendor hotlines will be unavailable during the Thanksgiving week outage.

Any stop payment request received by Cash Management by 10 a.m. will be placed and a new check will be issued prior to shut down of AP. Any stop payment request received between 10 a.m. on November 22 through 5 p.m. on November 27 will be placed at the bank but a check will not be reissued until December 2. In the event of an emergency please contact Michelle Sazo at 5-1647 for University policy on processing a manual emergency check.

All wire transfer requests must be submitted to Cash Management by 10 a.m. Please note that the associated web voucher must be approved in the system and all paperwork submitted to Cash Management prior to the 10 a.m. deadline.

At 6 p.m., the General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Applications Administration, Web Voucher, Budget Tool, PCard, CoA Web Maintenance Application, Bottomline, and Windstar systems come down. Cut-off for ADI journal processing also occurs at 6 p.m.

Financial systems remain unavailable.

HDW and related reporting systems are available with data last refreshed as of close of business on November 22.

Wire transfers are unavailable and there will be no foreign drafts issued. In the event of an emergency please contact Cheryl Margey at 5-5471.

All credit vouchers received daily between November 22 and 12 noon on November 27 will be deposited daily to the bank, processed in AR, and posted to the GL for November. This is necessary to allow the staff in Cash Receipts adequate time to enter the credit vouchers in the AR systems.

All Mass Taxable Sales deposits should be deposited daily at the bank and delivered to Cash Management. All deposits received in Cash Management by 5 p.m. on November 27 will be posted to the GL for November.

Requesting emergency checks to vendors is strongly discouraged. According to University policy, this service is limited to student emergencies, mortgage checks, and gold purchases. However, emergency checks can be processed manually during the business days of November 25-27 if authorized by the local unit Financial Dean or equivalent (on letterhead, with coding, authorizing signature, and original invoice provided) and delivered to the Director of Procurement for approval. You will be required to prepare a web voucher when the system comes back up on Monday, December 2.

All emergency check requests for student refunds or stipends must be made through the Students Receivable Office (SRO) by calling Mark Ford at 5-5693 or 5-2739. Once approved by SRO, emergency checks can be processed manually during the business days of November 25-27 if authorized by the local unit Financial Dean or equivalent.

All offices are closed and financial systems are down.

HDW and related reporting systems are available with data last refreshed as of close of business on November 22.

The project team performs testing of the 11i upgrade to confirm that it was successful. Any feed files sent to the General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, and Accounts Payable during the Thanksgiving week outage will be processed. If you plan to transmit multiple feed files during the outage, be sure to use a unique file extension to avoid writing over your own files.

Release 11i will be in production and OLTP systems available to the Harvard user community.

HDW and related reporting systems will be available with data as of November 22.

The HDW will be upgraded from version 11.0.3 to 11i overnight.

HDW upgrade to 11i complete.

HDW and related reporting systems will be unavailable, giving the HDW team time to identify and resolve any problems resulting from the upgrade.

HDW and related reporting systems will be available and will reflect all data entered on December 2-3 as well as any feeds that were processed during the previous weekend.

All systems should be working as normal.

Feeds entered by 5 p.m. on Thursday, December 5 that have Nov-02 indicated as the period will be processed in the month of November.

This was the originally planned month-end closing date for November. However, since users may need extra time to process their journal entries or run reports after the upgrade, the November month-end closing date will be extended until December 9.

This is the new month-end closing date for November.

Manual journal vouchers entered into the system by 8 a.m. on Monday, December 9 will be processed in the month of November.

Reports or request sets run on or before this date will reflect October as the last closed month, not November.

Reports or request sets run on or after this date will reflect November as the last closed month.

To install the J-initiator before December 2, download it from the UIS Helpdesk web page or get it from your local desktop support provider.

To install J-initiator after Oracle 11i goes live, go to the Financial Administration Applications page and click the J-initiator 1.1.8.19 link. (Note that the plug-in won't be on this page until December 2.)

Note: It is important that you download J-initiator from one of these Harvard sites since the plug-in has been customized for Harvard.

Save the installation file (oajinit11819.exe) to your desktop.

After you have downloaded and saved the file, quit IE.

Double-click the oajinit11819.exe file on your desktop to run the installer.

Accept the default answers to all of the installer's prompts and let it run. This may take a minute or two.

After the installer has finished, relaunch Internet Explorer.

Screenshot (if applicable)

Personal homepage

After December 2, when you log in to any of the Oracle financial applications, you will go through a new login window to the Oracle personal homepage.

The main menu of the personal homepage acts as a central point where you can log into any of the systems you have access to, as well as providing a link to the support documents on ABLE (through the button on the toolbar).

After logging onto the personal homepage, you can jump between all of the Oracle applications you have access to by returning to this page.

The main menu on the personal homepage is divided between Oracle Self Service applications (like Web Voucher and Web Voucher Reimbursement) and traditional Oracle forms-based applications (like General Ledger and Accounts Receivable).

Please note that you will still access AWS2, HUDINI, and any non-Oracle application separately from the Financial Administration Applications page.

Guide to accessing University financial systems

Oracle login page

Personal homepage

New VPF applications page

Oracle applications window

Different colors are now used to denote different types of fields. For example:

• White = a basic data entry field
• White with green text = a field with drilldown capability
• Yellow = a required field
• Gray = a display only field
• Blue = a searchable field

The drilldown and list of values buttons are now adjacent to the fields that they work with rather than only being available from the toolbar.

The drilldown button will appear to the left of a field that has drilldown capability.

The list of values button, which has changed from to , will appear to the right of a field that will display a list of valid values for that field.

The Oracle toolbar buttons have been updated. A complete list of the new Toolbar buttons is available here.

One important note is that the icon, used in older versions of Oracle to switch between active responsibilities, is no longer available. To change responsibilities in Oracle 11i, you will need to select "Switch Responsibility" from the File menu.

Screenshot (if applicable)

Main menu

When you log into your Oracle personal homepage, you will see three Web Voucher options under the Self Service heading. If you click on any of these options, the appropriate Web Voucher tasks will appear as a sub-menu.

• Notifications
• Create Web Voucher
• Create Credit Memo
• Copy Web Voucher
• Edit Saved Web Voucher
• Invoice Search
• Open Requisitions/Vouchers
• Requisition/Voucher History
• Reprint Web Voucher

WV Reimbursement:

• Notifications
• Create Reimbursement
• Create Employee Advance Request
• Create Amex Direct Pay
• Create Amex Credit
• Create Travel Authorization
• Copy Web Voucher
• Edit Saved Web Voucher
• Invoice Search
• Open Requisitions/Vouchers
• Requisition/Voucher History
• Reprint Web Voucher

WV User Preferences:

• Harvard Preferences
  • Default Approver
  • Default Account Coding
  • Create/Delete Notification Rules
• Reimbursement Email Maintenance
• Change Password

Personal homepage

WV main menu

WV Reimbursement

WV User Preferences

Where appropriate, the old procurement terminology has been removed from Web Voucher and replaced with terms associated with Harvard's business practices.

Examples:

• "Place Order Now?" has been replaced with "Submit Voucher Now?"
• The terms "Requisition Number" and "PO Number" have been replaced with "Web Voucher Number"

Copy line

Users will be pleased to know that the Oracle 11i upgrade will combine the "Apply Changes" functionality with the "Copy Line" button. Therefore, you will no longer need to click "Apply Changes" before using "Copy Line."

Additionally, you can now enter the number of new lines you want directly onto the main Web Voucher window, rather than using the pop-up window (up to 10 at a time).

Create WV

The WV User Preferences menu can be used to do the following tasks:

• Set a default approver for your vouchers
• Set default CoA coding that will be used in all of your vouchers (you can always edit the default coding when creating a new voucher, if necessary)
• Create or delete notification rules
• Set the email address that a reimbursement notification should be sent to
• Change your password

The option to create notification rules is relatively new to Web Voucher and allows users to minimize the number of notifications they receive. These rules will cause certain types of notifications to be deleted after one day rather than five. This is especially useful for users who create and approve their own vouchers.

WV User preferences

Harvard preferences

Currently there are two invoice search options in Web Voucher: "Search by Invoice Number" and "Search by PO Number."

In Oracle 11i these have been combined into a single search. The new functionality lets users search by PO number, vendor name, invoice number, and/or date in a single screen. Here is a quick reference that shows you how to look up information in Web Voucher.

In Oracle 11i, there are two updates to the WV notifications:

• You can now forward multiple vouchers to another reviewer all at once, rather than one at a time.
• An icon will appear next to any notification that requires an action, alerting you that you need to go into the notification.

Several system messages and alerts have been updated to be easier to understand. A complete list of all of the messages, why they would appear, and how to resolve them is available here.

This function, which is relatively new to Web Voucher, allows users to make a duplicate of an existing web voucher and use the copy as a template to create a new voucher. You can copy any web voucher, regardless of whether it was for a payment or a reimbursement, submitted or incomplete, approved or rejected.

Once you have chosen a voucher to copy, the system will automatically create a new voucher (with a new voucher number) containing the exact information from the original voucher. You can then edit any field (except Supplier) or submit the voucher as is.

This feature is particularly useful for users who need to process periodic vendor invoices that are the same each month or each time they are billed.

Screenshot (if applicable)

Downloading a file

When downloading a file from the Fiscal Budget Tool in Oracle 11i, the system will no longer give the file a ".bgt" extension by default. You will need to change the default file name that appears, which will vary depending on your desktop configuration, and add the .bgt extension before saving the file.

In Oracle 11i, the second browser window that opens during upload processing will not close until the file upload has finished.

Screenshot (if applicable)

Recurring journals

Depending on your security access, you may now be able to schedule automatically recurring journals. This option will appear on all user screens, but authorization to use it is limited.

When reversing a journal, the prefix has been changed from "Reverse" to "Reverses." Note that when searching for a journal after it has been reversed, you will need to enter the correct prefix.

You can now drill down from the account balances screen (in the Account Inquiry form) and from journal entries to transaction details within Oracle Receivables and Oracle Payables (subledgers).

Sub-Ledger Analysis provides two additional windows (T Accounts and Summary Activity), which show transaction account coding. You can view these windows simultaneously or one at a time.

You can also drill down to a transaction within Oracle Receivables and Oracle Payables to the associated transaction details from GL journals or balances screens. The view accounting windows (T Accounts and Summary Activity) are available in the GL, AR, and AP modules.

T Accounts

Summary activity

Screenshot (if applicable)

Accounting button

The accounting button is now called "distributions" on the transactions screen, making it more consistent with other Oracle applications.

This screen has been updated in many ways, including having the find screen come up automatically when you enter the customer screen. This will help all users, especially those responsible for customer maintenance. After your search completes, the "Match Results" screen will automatically appear.

When querying in the customer summary screen, the query results are listed numerically rather than alphabetically.

AR Find / Enter

Screenshot (if applicable)

Text reports

Reporting systems will no longer provide TEXT versions of reports after Oracle 11i goes live. Wherever there was a TEXT version only, a CSV version has been created, and wherever there was a TEXT and a PDF, a CSV has been created to replace the TEXT version.

In other words, for every report there will be at least a CSV, and in most cases a CSV and a PDF.

Users may encounter a problem with opening a report run in the PDF format. To avoid this problem, you will need to make the following change in your Adobe Acrobat preferences:

1. Close Internet Explorer.
2. Open Adobe Acrobat Reader.
3. Go to Edit > Preferences > General > Options.
4. Deselect "Display PDF in Browser."
5. Restart Internet Explorer.

You should now be able to view PDF files normally.