Policies & Procedures Manual - Elizabeth City State University

400.3.1.3Adopted: 06/14/05ELIZABETH CITY STATE UNIVERSITYFinancial Reporting Structure1. An account is the basic building block of the FRS. An FRS account contains a broadergrouping of information than is normally found in most accounting systems.An FRS account is a collection of both dollar and descriptive data concerning a particularactivity. An account can be recognized by the following characteristics:• It contains the records for a particular function or activity• It has one primary person responsible for its activity• It has two major kinds of data:1) Descriptive information (called attributes)2) Dollar recordsAccounts can be established for a variety of purposes. For example, an account would beestablished for any of the following purposes:• A balance sheet for an account in the general ledger - A sponsored project• A cost center• A departmental instructional function - A public service function• A service activityA unit might have any number of different accounts, as shown in the example below:• A state supported instructional account• A number of federally or privately funded research projects .• A number of departmental service activitiesA unit might have any number of different accounts for the same basic function, as shown inthe following example:• An instructional function broken down into a number of accounts eachrepresenting a field of interest within the subject