New Banner system not without its problems
Utah State University has been using the Banner system for a semester now, but new problems caused by switching to a new system and quirks within the Banner system are still cropping up.
Two such problems included a glitch that caused a two-day delay in picking up paychecks and further delays in picking up transcripts
Terry Hodges, the director of the human resources department at Utah State University, said the delay was caused by problems related to moving to the new Banner system. Banner, he said, requires time sheets to come in for all employees to be paid, but many departments on campus have their own method of keeping track of hours. He said the university had developed a program that would feed information from the different departments into the Banner system, in an effort to make payroll more convenient for different departments. Hodges said the program had been tested three times, but it still didn’t work out the way they thought it would.
The university’s program, Hodges said, in essence “confused the system.”
Approximately 880 employees did not have their paychecks direct deposited on Jan. 10 as scheduled, Hodges said. In a given pay period, he said, the university pays 4,000-5,000 people, so only about a quarter of employees were affected. Still, Hodges said there was no effort to minimize this problem.
“We tried to respond as quickly as possible,” he said. The university is in the process of reconfiguring the problematic program.
Hodges said the university chose to cut checks to employees instead of paying through direct deposit because trying to direct deposit would have delayed pay even further. Banks, he said, take about two days to get money into accounts after it has been paid out by the university. Instead, employees had to go to the International Lounge on Jan. 12 and stand in line to receive their checks.
In spite of the sometimes 10-15 minute wait, most students took the delay in stride. Kaelynn Monson, a sophomore who works for the music department, was among those who experienced a problem receiving pay. The paycheck delay, she said, was more an annoyance than a real crisis. Initially, she said, she was worried that she wouldn’t get paid at all, but when an e-mail was sent out to those potentially affected, telling them when and where to pick up their checks, she was no longer worried.
“It was kind of inconvenient,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going on until today.”
Luckily, she said, she had enough money saved up to pay for beginning-of-the-semester expenses such as groceries and books.
“It was a pain not having extra cash,” she said.
Ryan Devries, a senior who works for Facilities, agreed the delay wasn’t a huge problem, though still inconvenient.
“I’m just used to having money at a certain time,” he said.
Pay delays aren’t the only problem caused recently by switch-over to Banner. Students who need official transcripts from USU in order to transfer schools or apply for graduate school have also run into delays.
Heidi Beck, an associate registrar, said all transcripts being ordered have to be checked against the old system to ensure they are accurate, which can cause transcripts to take about a week to be ready.
“It’s a quality control thing,” she said.
Every school in the state that has converted to Banner has to go through the same process, Beck said. Transcripts are checked over line by line in order to make sure things have converted properly from the old system. Mainly, Beck said, problems come from stuff that was “fudged to make it look the way we wanted it to.”
Beck said minor problems are found on transcripts about 50 percent of the time, with bigger problems cropping up a couple times a day. Beck said a minor problem might be a student’s minor disappearing during a transfer, while a major problem might be an entire transcript being missing. In those cases, Beck said, a transcript is reconstructed using data from the old system.
The good news, she said, is “once a transcript is checked, it’s checked.”
This means that as time goes on, numbers of transcripts that need to be checked will decrease, she said. Still, she said, the problem will go on for years. She said the university is still checking transcripts against an even older system, which the university switched from in 1996. If a student has been at USU since before 1996 and has never requested a transcript, their transcript will still need to be checked against that older system, she said.
In order to serve students with urgent transcript needs, the Registrar’s Office has instituted an expatiated transcript fee, Beck said. Students who pay $10 instead of the usual $2 fee can have their transcripts checked and given to them within 24 hours. Beck said this policy helps the Registrar’s Office to prioritize. The fee, she said, goes to help pay those university employees who are working overtime to check transcripts. Since the expedited transcript policy has been in place, approximately 10 students a day have taken advantage of it, Beck said.
Both Hodges and Beck were hopeful that the problems with Banner would soon be ironed out as the number of transcripts needing to be checked dies down and as university employees learn how to properly use the system.
-dmaxfield@cc.usu.edu