Overview
The Berkeley Financial System (BFS) will update the BFS system and perform scheduled maintenance on Saturday, November 5, 2022. These updates will make the software current, improve security, and ensure that Oracle supports the BFS.
In This Release
The Berkeley Financial System (BFS) will release new updates, process improvements, and bug fixes, and perform maintenance over the weekend (Saturday, November 5 to Sunday, November 6, 2022).
This release includes 100 JIRA tickets that relate to 24 new releases, data cleanup, newly delivered functionality, and newly automated test scripts. We are also updating existing customizations and retiring older customizations. Additionally, there are some new customizations that will allow us to exclude encumbrance and pre-encumbrance journals from the mass delete process. However, most of the new customizations are associated with the implementation of the Common Chart of Accounts project. To learn more about the project please visit the Common Chart of Accounts Project page, or for detailed information, the Common Chart of Accounts informational page.
Most of the changes in this release won’t impact the average campus user; however, some of the updates strengthen our internal controls and fraud monitoring capabilities by adding level three data from our procurement card purchases. This will allow us to better match and validate receipt data provided by the cardholder to the associated metadata received directly from the bank. Level three data includes item descriptions, commodity and product codes, number of items purchased, etc. While receipts are always required per policy with credit card purchases, paired with metadata will allow us to enhance the campus’ existing fraud monitoring capabilities.
In the last couple of years, we have been working diligently to automate our testing. In total, we have 1,094 test scripts in our test script library of which 36% are automated. In this release, we have improved the validation on 53 of our automated scripts. We have also begun working with our end user groups to automate their user acceptance tests. Automating these scripts will remove the need for the development team, the analyst team, and the end users from spending their valuable time executing regression tests. This also improves workforce efficiencies and allows us to redirect our staff to other high priority work
The Controller’s Office continues, with the partnership of Berkeley IT and our system vendor, Oracle/Peoplesoft, to invest in our major enterprise financial applications to ensure transactions are processed completely and accurately in a secure environment.
User Acceptance Testing
User acceptance testing is occurring between October 19, 2022, and October 28, 2022. Direct communications will be sent to those participating in the test cycles.
Resources
Contact
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to the BFS Help Desk at bfs@berkeley.edu.