The Traffic Cone

“Guiding you over and around the bumps of your payroll journey”

Provided by Syl Luhring – Payroll Supervisor, State Accounting (471-1460)

August 25, 2009

This note is intended for all of the agencies who received my letter, dated August 14^th, and the list of names and accounts for verification. If you were fortunate enough not to have received the letter, your account information for deposit of the expense reimbursement payments was consistent with the information provided on the payroll side and required no further action at that point.

When we began using NIS in 2003, all banking information from the old program was “rolled forward” into NIS. This included information on the Accounts Payable side as well as Payroll. Now, as we are trying to solidify the deposit information on both sides (Payroll and AP), we had concerns about the integrity of the accounts listed in Accounts Payable for direct deposit of the expense reimbursement (ER). Our intentions are to display every employee’s deposit information (including that for the ER) on the payroll side in the Auto Deposit screen. Creating the list was the first of several steps to assure accuracy of the information listed for both Payroll and ER as listed on the Auto Deposit Screen.

The list you received was created by comparing the list of employee’s direct deposit accounts on the Accounts Payable side with those on the Payroll side. If the AP number matched any of the ones on the Payroll side, the name was not included on the list. Those AP account numbers that did not match any account information in the Payroll list were printed out on the list with AB#, Name, Account #, and the Security Business Unit the employee was affiliated with. These accounts would not appear on the employee’s Auto Deposit screen since the number did not match any of those on the Payroll list.

The intent of the August 14^th letter was for you to contact each employee on the list to confirm that the account number listed is an active account and the one to which they want the expense reimbursement to go. If it is the correct number, please enter that information onto the auto deposit screen under employee information as an “Expense Reimbursement account”. (See screen shot below). If the account is not correct, send the employee a copy of the Direct Deposit Information form asking them to complete the form with the new number.

Some agencies are sending the Information form to all employees regardless, asking them to update the information in the system and to list the account to be set for deposit of the expense reimbursement. This process creates more work on your part but will ultimately result in cleaner deposit information and less errors when making an ER deposit.

The last step of the conversion process will occur on September 14^th. A query will be run to identify any employee who does not have an expense reimbursement account set up in NIS. Those accounts will be automatically set up with the expense deposit being scheduled to go into the same account as that designated for the remainder “R” of the payroll deposit.

I hope this sheds a little more light on the August 14^th letter. If you have problems or questions about the process, please call or email me. 471-1460 or syl.luhring@nebraska.gov

Thanks again for your cooperation in this effort.

Auto Deposit Setup

For Payroll – Enter the start date, bank account number, bank transit number, method code, and a 22 (checking) or a 32 (savings). The pre-note flag should always be set to N.

For Expense Reimbursement – follow the same process as above but adding the same date as the start date into the stop date (this is mandatory). In the MC column, enter an “E” instead of the other options offered above. This flags the account as the expense reimbursement deposit account.

State Accounting uses the entries on this line to identify the ER accounts to be set up and runs a daily process by which this ER auto deposit information is transferred into the employee’s file on the AP side for the expense reimbursement payment.