BruinBuy Plus
We heard you! To best support departmental needs, the updated launch date for BruinBuy Plus is now January 2, 2024!
As shared in previous campus communications, there will be a required two-week system shutdown to transition from BruinBuy to BruinBuy Plus. Many departments shared that this may impact their day-to-day operations, so we opted to minimize disruption by aligning the launch date with UCLA’s winter closure.
If you want more information to help you and your department prepare for this system change, explore the new Prepare for BruinBuy Plus and Changes by Role webpages.
TRAINING UPDATE
With BruinBuy Plus now scheduled to launch in early January, training dates have shifted to start in November 2023.
Training will be tailored by role and system responsibilities. To accommodate diverse training needs and varied schedules, a wide range of options for live and web-based training will be available. Users will also be supported with written materials such as quick reference guides and manuals, as well as with live support such as office hours and learning labs.
Want to learn more? Visit the new BruinBuy Plus Training page for updates.
Bruin Finance
Over the past several months, the Ascend 2.0 program has worked with departmental IT professionals across campus to retrofit existing UCLA "boundary systems" to the new financial systems. A “boundary system” is any system used by a department at UCLA that will exchange financial information with core financial systems and/or the Financial Information Hub (FIH). Examples of boundary systems include UCPath, Billing and Receivables (BAR), and Job Management System (JMS).
Currently, IT staff are completing several activities to modify or “retrofit” their systems. The goal of these activities is to ensure that existing campus systems can exchange financial information with Bruin Finance when it launches. To support this process, numerous members of the Ascend 2.0 program team – such as Technical, Chart of Accounts, and Reporting teams - have conducted technical workshops with each boundary system department. During these workshops, we collaborated with departmental IT staff to strategize how to modify their systems by completing Design Specification Documents (DSDs).
The Ascend 2.0 team will continue to meet regularly with departmental IT staff to ensure they have the support required to complete their system’s retrofit over the next few months.
Chart of Accounts
The Ascend 2.0 team continues to work with campus partners, including Mapping Experts and Organization Financial Leaders (OFLs), to standardize and optimize the Chart of Accounts (CoA). Currently, Mapping Experts and OFLs are participating in a few initiatives:
- Mapping newly-used Full Accounting Units (FAUs) to the CoA, which will occur on a monthly basis until the launch of Bruin Finance
- For CoA values which have already been mapped, reviewing and updating to ensure consistent approaches across campus
- Attending monthly education sessions to learn how they will use the new CoA
These mapping activities are critical to the project’s success to ensure there is a complete and accurate mapping of FAUs before Bruin Finance launches in late 2024. As of September 2023, over 2.2 million FAUs have been mapped to the CoA.