Public Bodies Menu

In accordance with the Financial Information Act, Chapter 131, Statutes of British Columbia, 1979, all salaries, wages, travel and other expenses as well as payments to corporations, firms and individuals for supplies and services rendered must be made available for public disclosure. Similar reports are required in other jurisdictions. The Public Bodies Menu will allow the user to collect and report on all information required by the provincial statute.

The following notes regarding the operation of the Public Bodies System are provided to help you understand its interaction with the accounting and payroll system files. We hope that by providing this information it will save you some concern about doing your year end and help you understand the source of the information.

The Public Bodies System does not use the summary information contained either in the vendor file or in the payroll master records. The information collected comes directly from the invoice file in the Budgetary Accounting System and is based on the period when the invoices are entered (accrued). The information from payroll comes from the detailed pay period records maintained in the year-to-date file in the payroll system. This means that public bodies can be run totally independent of year-end processes for both the accounting and payroll systems. Be sure to run this process before you purge either your year-to-date payroll files or your invoice files.

The collection run for atrieveFinance collects the information for both suppliers and staff where staff expenses have been paid through the Budgetary Accounting System. These two groups use the Type Code A and Type Code B from the Public Bodies System. This means that all payroll types must begin with Type C and greater. The system has been set up so that each of the payrolls can be kept separate and titled separately in the Public Bodies Report or can be run together into a single report for all payrolls.

The data collection for payroll into public bodies must be run for each payroll. If you want to use the default directory or a logical pointer to the payroll files for each payroll, then you must set up a separate type code in public bodies for each payroll account. The data collection will bring the payroll records into the public bodies detail file together with the supplier and expense information.

The system has been revised so that you can coordinate employee paid expenses with the salary element so that the two will be printed together in the Public Bodies Report. If your employee numbers and their corresponding number in the vendor file are the same, then this was easily accomplished in last year's version. If you use different vendor numbers from your employee number, there is a method included this year which will allow you to coordinate the two files. In the first step, you identify each of your employees in the atrieveFinance vendor file and add their social insurance number to the tax Registration number field. When you do the data collection, you have the system use the tax registration number as it's key. When you run the data collection from payroll use the social insurance number. This will assure that the numbers can be matched. The system will check, and any employee paid expenses will be matched against appropriate payroll records and the two printed on the same line in the report.

For the system to identify employee paid expenses, you must identify each employee with a unique identifier for employees. This is done using the vendor type code on the Budgetary Accounting System vendor master file. The 2-character type code must be the same for all employees and must not be a type code used for any of your suppliers.

Statement of Financial Information (SOFI)

You must report not only payments made to staff, but payments made on behalf of the staff. This means that payments made to VISA or travel agents or conference facilitators on behalf of persons who have traveled for your organization or who have been registered in courses or conferences as members of your organization require the recording of these payments as though the payments were made to the individual and are to be reported in the Public Bodies Report as such. We also understand that the limit for the amounts that are required to be reported has been adjusted. To accommodate these changes, we have revised the reporting. The following steps are required on your part to accommodate the new reporting of payments made to third parties on behalf of employees.

There are two or three options available to each of you in recording these payments. Some of your organizations require that each employee pay their own registration fees, their own travel costs and their own VISA payments and other items that would come under this clause. When they do this, you reimburse them for their payments. In this situation there are no changes required to accommodate the requirements of the act. Several organizations do pay directly to VISA or to conference facilitators or to travel agents.

Payments covering several employees: In these situations, each invoice so entered must be coded according to the following rules for us to be able to pick up the information and include it in the report.

In the Reference field on each invoice, the following coding is to be included for reporting requirements:

The following section describes the manual coding method. If you press <INSERT HERE> you will be asked for the vendor number and amount (see invoice entry documentation). This method validates the data and saves later error correction.

The coding block must begin with 'F/', followed by the vendor number of the individual to whom this payment is assigned. The vendor number must be terminated with a '/'. This is the only coding required, if the full invoice is assigned to a single individual.

If the invoice covers multiple individuals or the invoice amount differs from the amount to be charged to the employee, the following additions are required to the coding:

Where the amount differs between the invoice total and the amount assigned to the individual. Following the '/' which terminates the vendor number, enter the amount with a decimal for the amount to be assigned to the employee. Terminate this with a '/'.

Where the invoice covers multiple employees, the coding block described previously which includes the vendor number and amounts both terminated with a '/', is to be replicated for each employee included in the invoice. The following examples will show you what each of these coding blocks would look like.

The first entry is a coding block which would be used for an invoice paid for one employee where the amount is equal to the total amount of the invoice.

The second coding block is for an invoice paid for an individual but where the total amount of the invoice and the amount to be charged to the employee differ.

The third example is a coding block used on an invoice where the report is for multiple employees.

1. F/001235/
2. F/001235/157.75/
3. F/001235/185.40/0075YYYY/189.41/

The financial reporting module was designed to extract these amounts from the invoice file during the production of the report. These will be included in the report under the employee number identified in the vendor number field in the coding block.