Alma has 3 points of connection with PeopleSoft: Export Invoices For Payment, Import Payment Confirmation, and Funds Allocation Loader.

Export Invoices For Payment

Time Run: 19:00 EST/EDT daily

Summary

This job exports all invoices approved that day with a Payment method of Accounting Department. This changes the statuses of the invoices from Ready to be paid to Waiting for payment. Code running on our lib-jobs server (See code on Github) transforms the Alma invoices into a format that PeopleSoft accepts. This code checks for the following errors in the invoices:

No reporting code on an invoice line.
There is no valid combination of Prime Department and Prime Fund on an invoice line.

If an invoice has no error, it is omitted from the file that gets sent to PeopleSoft. In addition to the above error checking, the lib-jobs code calculates a voucher ID. When all invoices have been processed, lib-jobs sends a file to OnBase to update invoices with the new voucher ID as well as another file to PeopleSoft for loading the vouchers for payment. Lib-jobs also produces a summary report and emails it to the Library Finance team.

Calculating the Voucher ID

Every invoice in Alma has a unique identifier. The format of the identifier is as follows:

16 1827013800 06421

The first two digits (11, 14, 15, or 16) identify the object type as an invoice. It is unclear when the different prefixes are used from Ex Libris documentation.

The final 5 digits identify this object as a PUL object. The middle segment is the unique number of the invoice. The lib-jobs code converts this number to base 36(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base36). An 'A' gets added to the beginning of the voucher ID to identify it as originating from Alma. So the above invoice identifier becomes

AU7R8VC

Import Payment Confirmation

Time run: 11:00 EST/EDT daily

Summary

This job imports vouchers from PeopleSoft once they have reached their final state, paid or otherwise. If a voucher was processed for payment in PeopleSoft, a message is sent from PeopleSoft with the date the payment was processed, the voucher ID, and the final amount paid. When the payment confirmation has been processed, the invoice's status in Alma changes from Waiting for payment to Closed.

If a voucher was stopped for payment, a message is sent from PeopleSoft that places the invoice back to In Review in Alma. However, vouchers that are stopped for payment often get processed at a later date. We are investigating this, to determine if this part of the integration should be active, or if we should only get confirmation for vouchers that were successfully posted for payment.

Funds Allocation Loader

Time run: 07:00 EST/EDT daily

Summary

This job imports all fund transactions from PeopleSoft that did not originate from the library. This includes currency conversion adjustments, expenses posted to PeopleSoft directly, fund transfers, journal corrections, and fund allocations. This synchronizes the fund balances in Alma with the actual balances of the chartstring in PeopleSoft.

Note on Encumbrances

Encumbrances represents commitments on funds that have not yet been expended. Encumbrances are not synchronized between Alma and PeopleSoft. Most encumbrances for the funds used in Acquisitions reside in Alma, so Alma is the primary system for tracking them. However, some funds have encumbrances that reside in PeopleSoft. For those funds, one will have to look at the encumbrances in Alma in addition to the encumbrances in PeopleSoft.