What are the differences in the roles & responsibilities of the Finance Shared Services Unit Liaisons, formerly Assistant Financial Officers, in relation to Academic Financial Officers?
The Unit Liaison position is a temporary position to help facilitate transaction processing in the move to the Finance Shared Services model. The goal is to transition the finance transaction processing activities to a central team to allow the school/unit’s remaining finance staff to focus on the strategic needs of their respective school/unit. Current Unit Liaisons will be transitioning to their permanent positions over the coming months.
Each school is responsible for providing strategic and decision support for their area (typically performed by the incumbent FO), initiating transactions for their area, and providing any needed data for the Finance Shared Services area to appropriately process and record any transactions. Examples of some of these activities are:
• School/unit forecasting & projections
• Annual budget process
• Annual merit process
• Monthly financial review
• Monthly budget monitoring
• Ad hoc modeling & analysis
• Specialized external reporting
• Contract administration
• Space utilization monitoring
The Finance Shared Services team is responsible for implementing new or modifying existing processes to transition transactional processing to the Finance Shared Services area. This includes the items listed below in addition to the various activities that have historically been performed centrally (i.e. treasury, audit, grant compliance, accounts payable, payroll, etc.):
• Balance sheet reconciliations
• Endowment monitoring
• Management reporting
• Non-resident alien payments
• Fixed asset inventory
• Journal entry processing
• Year-end close
