What is a COA?
The Chart of Accounts (COA) is the internal language UCR uses to record all financial transactions that is compliant with the systemwide UC common chart of accounts. For more information, see the Chart of Accounts page on Impact23. Please confer with your financial analyst to make sure you have your COA for your department accounts. This information is used for all expenses.
Before 2023, this information was encoded in a Full Accounting Unit (FAU). The components of a COA are as follows:
- Entity: for the most part, this is 1511 corresponding to the UCR Campus
- Fund: the most common values are
- 19900 for general funds and
- 21100 for federal awards
- Activity: this is usually our department, A01101 for Physics & Astronomy.
- If you need to specify an organization, ORG14 corresponds to CNAS
- Account: this specifies the type of transaction. This does not usually come up for department members.
- Function: this is a two character classification of the purpose of the transaction. The most common value is 44 for research.
- Program: this specifies system-wide/cross-campus programs. Usually this is simply 000 for the "default program."
- Project: a 10 character code that encodes a project with a fixed start and end date. You can confirm your relevant project code with your analyst.
- Flex 1 and 2: these codes assist in financial management. For most cases you can use the default value, which is all zeroes.
What is a POETAF?
The POETAF (Project, Org, Expenditure, Task, Award, Fund) code is a modified chart of accounts that is used in the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) system. This separate PPM system exists to manage the complexity of contracts and grants. Some applications (e.g. procurement) require the POETAF chart string to streamline data entry.
