BOFINS

Description

BOFINS (Bristol Online Financial System) is a web-based finance reporting tool. It reports the relevant financial and personnel details of all current externally sponsored research projects.

All current research projects have their own page which provides the Principal Investigators and any staff to which they nominate access, the financial information for the project. The information available includes an overview of the budget, transactions, income and commitments to date, a detailed list of transactions by financial period, a page to manage commitments and a page to view the details of staff employed on the project and their salary commitments. Each Principal Investigator has their own page which lists all their projects and links to them and allows viewing of the transactions on any of their projects. Each department also has its own page where they can view a financial summary and financial forecast for all the current projects within their department and any departments below them in the hierarchy. There is also a list of all current projects by sponsor type, sponsor or principal investigator. The administration home page allows the finance office to manage the system and access projects and departments pages.

Accessing BOFINS

The system is available to all Heads of Department and Principal Investigators, access is through the BOFINS login page where users are asked to supply their UOB username and password.

Departmental Administrators with a research remit may be given access, their Head of Department should request access the Finance Office. There is an application form available from the home page of the Finance Office website. For additional staff needing access to view details of an individual project the Principal Investigator will be able to grant access via the 'Manage Users' tab within the project. Please note there are two levels of access, Full Read Rights - to see exactly the same details as the PI, and Limited Read Rights - to restrict access to summary details on salaries and to disallow access to Personnel information.

Training

Training is available. See the relevant Staff Development course schedule.

Documentation

There is documentation entitled Research Finance Reporting system available from the Finance Office website.

Support

In the first instance support requests should be made via email to finance-bofins (finance-bofins@bristol.ac.uk).