FY26 Blanket order entry can begin on Monday, April 14 . A new workday enhancement will be turned on the week of April 7 to allow for future dated requisitions. Prior to this enhancement, users were instructed to "current date" blanket requests, and then the Controller's Office had to run a manual job during month end close in April and May to roll the encumbrances into the future fiscal year. With this new enhancement, all FY26 blanket order requisitions should be entered as future dated requests (request date of 7/1/25). The corresponding purchase order (PO) document dates and encumbrances will also be future dated, so they are correctly recorded for FY26. The PO will be issued after the requisition is fully approved.
Other important information to be aware of with this enhancement:
Future dated requisitions should not be entered for more than a year in advance, except for multiyear service contracts. Please contact purchasing to discuss entry for multiyear service contracts. FY26 blankets that are not future dated will be sent back for corrections. If users begin invoicing the future dated blanket early (e.g., start invoicing a FY26 blanket in FY25), it results in a mismatch because the liquidation will happen in the current year, but the encumbrance is in the future year. As a reminder, blanket orders are supposed to be used in the fiscal year they are intended for. If a FY26 blanket requisition is inadvertently entered with a current year FY25 request date, FY25 is where the encumbrance will remain until the June year end procurement roll forward. The Controller's Office will no longer be rolling forward purchase orders at the end of April and May. If a unit does not want to wait until June for the encumbrances to be correctly shown in FY26, they should do a change order. If needed, future dated requisitions can be tied to future dated supplier contracts (Example: a blanket requisition is entered in May for a 7/1/25 start date, and a new contract is signed in May but is not effective until 7/1/25). The Create Blanket Purchase Order job aid will be updated in coordination with the functionality being turned on, the week of April 7 .
See the full post for additional reminders about the use of blanket orders.
FY26 Blanket order entry can begin on Monday, April 14, 2025 . A new workday enhancement will be turned on the week of April 7th to allow for future dated requisitions. Prior to this enhancement, users were instructed to current date blanket requests, and then the Controller's Office had to run a manual job during month end close in April and May to roll the encumbrances into the future fiscal year.
With the new enhancement, all FY26 blanket order requisitions should be entered as future dated requests (request date of 7/1/25) . The corresponding purchase order (PO) document dates and encumbrances will also be future dated, so they are correctly recorded for FY26. The PO will be issued after the requisition is fully approved.
See the full post for more details to be aware of with this enhancement.
Requirements have been updated to provide guidance on how employee vs independent contractor work at Ohio State should be classified.
If you plan to hire certain types of individuals or businesses for work in your area, you must follow these requirements to ensure they are correctly classified as employees or independent contractors. The Independent Contractor Guidelines provide an overview of the process for how to evaluate independent contractors and are available on the Purchasing website.
Additionally an Independent Contractor form is available on the Policies and Forms page of the Business and Finance website. This form is a decision-making and documentation tool which is to be used by departments when purchasing services from individuals.
In preparation for the combined federal and state filing changes, the Payee Setup Form along with the Miscellaneous Payee and Miscellaneous Payment Request tasks will be updated to include additional address prompts for 1099 income reporting when the state in which work is performed differs from the state associated with the payee’s primary address. The changes listed in the full post will occur on January 17.
Please do not begin entering FY26 blanket purchase orders until April 14, 2025. More information and detailed instructions on creating FY26 blanket purchase orders is forthcoming.
To assist with the year-end procurement roll-forward process, the Controller’s Office will be analyzing and closing out old internal and external Purchase Orders (PO) which meet the parameters listed below.
POs that are over two years old which have not been invoiced in the previous year (excluding POs for multiyear service contracts that are only billed annually, those related to construction projects beginning with "PJOSU," OAKS type POs, and those that are FD520 grant related).
This will occur the last week of December 2024. As a reminder, this process occurs on a 6-month closure cadence (during the last week of December and the first week of June each year). To see what POs will be closed as part of this process, run the "Find Purchase Order Details – OSU" report, and filter using the above parameters and the "last invoice date" column.
Once POs are mass closed, if there is a true need, they can be reopened by the service center if the transaction is within the same fiscal year. If you see that a PO is closed and believe it was closed in error, review the process history of the PO and contact the user who closed it. Users with the Spend Analyst security role can view who closed POs in the PO process history.
While this is a semi-annual cleanup effort, units are still required to work with service centers to close POs on a regular basis and once it is apparent the PO will no longer be used.
Beginning Thursday, October 24 , two new fields will be added at the header level of a requisition. These new fields are "Freight" and "Other Charges." This change will allow end users to account for any freight or additional handling charges noted on a quote without adding a line item to the requisition. Amounts entered in these fields will carry over to the corresponding purchase order to allow for invoice matching. Please note, the freight and other charges amounts will add to the purchase order encumbrance and will liquidate once invoiced.
Several reports will have two new columns added to the output of the report, one for "Freight" and one for "Other Charges." These changes are related to the ability to add these amounts to the header of a requisition. The reports updated are listed in the full post.
Two supplier invoice matching rules will be updated on Thursday, October 24 . The changes detailed in the full post will be made for the University only.
During the week of September 9 , Ohio State will start utilizing the auto-close functionality provided by Workday for university purchase orders for goods. When a university purchase order for goods meets the criteria listed below, they will automatically close.
- Fully received: where all quantities ordered have been marked received in Workday
- Fully invoiced and paid: when all the quantities ordered have been invoiced and payments have all been issued to the vendors
This will only apply to purchase orders where these criteria are met after September 9. If your purchase order has already been receipted and fully invoiced/paid prior to September 9, they will have to be sent to the Service Center through the current closure process.
Please pay special attention when building/approving requisitions for goods lines to ensure that the quotes match the requisition. Contact the Service Center if you have questions on how to build requisitions.
During the evening of Thursday, August 29 , enhancements will be made to the internal order billing process to allow for negative invoice line amounts. Currently, refunds/credits to customers can only be accomplished using a cost center journal. Negative invoicing will replace cost center journals as the standard practice for issuing refunds/credits to customers.
Please note that due to a Workday constraint, the negative invoices will only get picked up for settlement once there is an overall positive total invoice amount for that internal supplier ID. Service line invoices will have to be refunded with negative service lines. Goods lines will have to be refunded by entering a negative quantity and the corresponding unit price to prevent PO liquidation issues. These updates will be reflected on the internal order billing job aid (login required) and will be discussed in the September Finance Office hours.
