When you first log into Cost Recovery, you will see a list of billing periods, including the current billing period and the two previous billing periods. You can also view billing periods further back by using the "Other Billing Period" feature. 
Most likely, you will more often be going to the billing period that is over and for which processing of charges has not been completed (March 2011 in the example above). This is where you will go to review charges for your lab or labs. If you choose the current billing period, you can go to "Monthly Charges To Date" to view the charges for this billing period. Other options are disabled until the billing period is over. For details on the "Monthly Charges To Date" report, see that section further down on this page.
Billing Period Status
The billing period home page represents one billing period (i.e. one month). The first section of the billing period shows the status of the billing period.
In this example, the billing period is still in process (i.e. charges have not been billed yet). Also, the Coral facility review is not completed. That means that there are lab managers who have not reviewed their charges yet.
Reviewing Charges
The next section is for tasks. If you are a lab manager and you have not completed your review, you will see the Manage Coral Charges - Facility Review task with the green "GO" button enabled. This section will also tell you which lab or labs you are authorized to review and whether or not they are completed. You would click "GO" to review charges. This will take you to the Review Coral Charges page.
The screenshot above shows the review charges interface. This page shows the imported Coral charges for the current billing period for lab areas you are authorized to review. In addition to several columns providing basic information about the charges, the charges table provides three additional columns:
- Override: Text in the override column for a given charge indicates that some property of the charge was modified during the cost recovery review process. The text should provide an explanation as to the nature of the change. Changes can be applied to the process units, wafers, member (lab identity), organization, and cost object.
- You might make changes because of some specific knowledge regarding a specific charge. This could include:
- Information gathered from the comments entered by the user when the charge was incurred. These comments also appear in the charges table.
- Information communicated directly to the you from the user.
- Knowledge of lab procedures that allow the lab manager to spot errors in entering charge information.
- The action required field indicates that there is an action required record created for this charge, indicating that the fiscal staff need to take some action regarding the charge. You might create such a record if you know adjustments need to be made to a charge, but you don't have all of the information required to complete the change.
- You might make changes because of some specific knowledge regarding a specific charge. This could include:
- Action Completed: Text in this column indicates that the required action has been completed. This would usually be entered by the fiscal staff officer once they have resolved the issue specified in the action required column and would not normally be filled in during the facility review.
To make changes or create an action required record for a charge, click on the arrow at the start of that row. That will open the following dialog box.
You can provide new values for process units (process units reflect the cost of a charge, for your department there will be a specific value by which this number is multiplied to determine the final dollar cost), wafers, member, organization, and cost object number. These values will be saved and used when charges are actually billed. The original values are still saved and a record of your change is created in the database. If you wish to have fiscal staff take action on the charge, enter text in the action required field. As a lab manager you would not normally enter any value for action completed. As another option, Coral charge data can be downloaded (Download to Excel) and changes can be made within Excel. Then these changes can be uploaded (Upload Changes). Review the upload page before starting changes in Excel as there are special instructions on that page regarding how to make edits.
Once you have completed your review, you should click on "Finish Lab Area Review." You will see a form that looks something like this:
You can select one or more lab areas to mark as completed. Once you have done this for a lab area, the fiscal staff can go in to deal with any action required records you have created. And once all lab areas have been completed, they can complete the billing period (i.e. submit charges to SAP, send out invoices, etc.). Once you have completed reviewing all lab areas for which you are authorized, you are done for that billing period.
Reports
Monthly Charges to Date Report
