Getting Started

Cern Expenditure Tracking (CET) was built for CERN in order for it to meet the Expenditure Tracking needs and challenges for the LHC construction.

With the large scale of the LHC project and the numerous contracts associated with LHC, CERN requires a tool which, apart from basic expenditure tracking, provides:

• Focus on the Contract
• Better pluri-annual reporting
• Differentiation between budget-code payments paid and payments received by the supplier
• Combination of financial & non-financial data to assist in helping re-alignment of commitments / cashflow forecasting
• Earned Value reporting

Essentially it is a tool not just to examine the past, but also to help forecast the future.

Functions in the 'Contracts' menu are focused on providing you with information related to contracts.

Contracts are generated at CERN by the purchasing department using CFU and are subsequently integrated into CERN's purchasing and financial software Qualiac for the generation of orders on the contracts.

The Contracts menu provides a user friendly view on both the CFU and Qualiac data. You will be able to see such information as:

• Contract Signed Amount
• Finance Committee Authorised Amount
• Influence of exchange rate fluctuations
• Price revisions and contract amendments.

Different reports allow you to decompose the contract by different components

Reports in the 'Transactions' menu are focused on providing you with financial information directly from the financial system in a way that is easy-to-interpret for non-accountants.

The standard used at CERN is often called 'S12' (the name of the original financial report produced from the IBM mainframes in the 80's).

This report consolidates all double-entry book keeping transactions into one-line per business item. Each record contains details about the sums paid, committed and about open commitments (i.e. remaining to be paid).

From this menu you will be able to obtain transactions relating to:

• CERN Cost Centres (and orders made on those cost centres)
• TEAM codes (including income /cashflow transactions)
• JOB codes

Reports in the 'Summaries & Totals' menu allow you to have an overview of your expenditure without necessarily viewing the details of each individual financial transaction.

Summaries may be at sector, department, group or even budget code level. It is also possible to group by supplier, contract, project or PPA. At any of these levels summaries will provide amounts for payments, commitments and open commitments.

The EVM data can also be reviewed at the 'Summary' level.

The 'Other Reports' menu is the area where detailed-level miscellaneous reports such as:

• Telephone Details,
• Electronics Pool
• Claims
• Stores Details
• Invoice Pipeline

are found. These reports do not fall into the broader category of Contracts / Transactions / Summaries. Consider this section as the miscellaneous section of CET.

The items under the 'Info' menu have been created to support the use of other reports.

This part of the application provides a search facility for retrieving Cost Centres (by hierarchy), Budget Codes, Contracts, Suppliers, Destination/ Activity Codes, Nature/ Account Codes, Order Statuses and Types.