You will hear the anacronym “C.O.A.” often, which stands for “Chart Of Accounts.” When someone requests a COA from you, they are looking for a long, alpha-numeric code, that has either 4 or 5 segments to it. Don’t know your COA? No problem! In the business office, we do our best to keep track of everyone’s accounts, and we can provide that long code for you if needed. Keep in mind that we do not always receive notifications of new COA’s from external departments or programs, like stipends, gifts, awards or funding sources that other departments process on your behalf, such as MacMillan Center.
So, if you receive a new COA, please forward this info to us so we can help keep track of your accounts.
If you have a “default” COA, such as your ER&M research account, then you do not need to specify charging instructions on each P-card charge, as long as the business office is clear that this is your default COA. (For example, if you have a Start-up account and a Research account, then your default COA is your research account.) However, please be sure to inform the business office if you wish to allocate an expense to an account that is not your default COA. If you have multiple COAs and do not have a default account, please provide clear charging instructions for every transaction.
You may prefer to send all receipts via email, provide information from the weekly Workday pending transaction report that we send you, forward the automated notifications from Workday with details listed, create your own spreadsheet, provide paper receipts, or meet with staff remotely/in person and we can dictate your explanations. We are flexible. Whatever works best for you is fine with us, as long as we can get your transactions cleared within 30 days, ideally. Typically, we process charges for our department only (cost center CC0538), but there are exceptions to this.