Carnegie Mellon University

CMU Finance Fundamentals

The accuracy of the university's financial reports is dependent on you.  Whether you are a new employee or a seasoned employee, the financial responsibilities of your position affect transactions in the Oracle Financial System.  Perhaps your responsibility is to process expense reports.  Maybe you are a buyer for your department using the PCard (Purchasing Card) or POs (Purchase Orders).  It's possible that your duties might include entering a journal entry in the General Ledger or a usage batch in Grants Accounting.

To successfully perform any of these duties you should:

  1. Thoroughly understand the university's chart of accounts.  The key to an accurate transaction is a correct account string.  Entering a correct account string requires that you are familiar with the types of information stored within an account string.
  2. Recognize the types of transactions that flow through the Oracle Financial System.  This includes knowledge of the relationship between the Oracle modules within the system.

This course will provide the fundamentals to achieve both of these objectives.  This course will review both the General Ledger Chart of Accounts and the Grants Accounting Chart of Accounts along with the types of transactions flowing through the Oracle system.

This course is a prerequisite for Oracle Financials training sessions as well as for system access. Completing this course and passing the certification assessment is required to be considered eligible for access to the Oracle Financial Applications and/or the Financial Data Warehouse. In order to pass this course, a minimum of 25 questions out of 30 questions must be answered correctly. Each user can attempt to pass the certification quiz up to three (3) times. Once you have passed the assessment, your successful completion will be logged and will be referenced by the Business Systems Help Desk to determine additional Oracle/Financial Data Warehouse training class and system access eligibility.

This course takes approximately 90 minutes to complete, but does not need to be completed all in one sitting. You may stop and return to the course at any time. To experience the full multimedia content of this course, please be sure that your computer has a functional sound card and that your speakers or headphones are connected.