Your Budget

  • Overview of Division Funding

  • The General Ledger & Your Budget Lines

  • Your Budget Data - A MyWhitman Overview

  • Step-By-Step Guide to Financial Management (MyWhitman)

  • Requesting Additional Funds

Overview of Division Funding

You will receive access to the budgets pertaining to your position. In February, the Board of Trustees approve the budget for the following year, and this information is disseminated at the end of June just prior to the new fiscal year on July 1.

Your budget or budgets can be viewed via MyWhitman. Web budgets reflect debits and credits in real time.

The Division for Diversity and Inclusion receives funding from various institutional sources. For further context, review this 6-page overview of funding sources, including endowments, scholarships, and donation accounts pertaining to DI: Diversity and Inclusion Budget and Funding Information

Requesting Additional Funds Use this form to request funding from the DEI accounts managed by the VPDI (Maxwell Lecture, MISA Endowment, Undocumented Legal Defense, Mellon), for special projects and programs. Family Connections and Cultivation Grant funds have a separate application process.

The General Ledger & Your Budget Lines

Whitman College maintains a general ledger from which budget codes can be sourced. There are over 54,000 object codes related to college budgets, all contained within one searchable document that is updated regularly and can be viewed here.

General Ledger budget indicators are 14-digit numbers, providing the following information:

Fund / Location / Function / Department / Object Code

As a Division, we are mainly focused on the 5-digit Department code and the 4-digit Object code.

We utilize budget codes for everything that we purchase, both on and off campus, so that the Business Office team know which department or endowment to charge transactions to.

Example: The Intercultural Center department code is 90002. The object code that comes after this attributes expenditure to the correct budget line:

  • 1-81-42-90002-5200 (Supplies)

  • 1-81-42-90002-5300 (Services)

  • 1-81-42-90002-5600 (Communications)

  • 1-81-42-90002-5703 (Local Meals)

  • 1-81-42-90002-5742 (Events)

A link to the General Ledger Accounts Excel File can be found on the Budgets & the General Ledger webpage.

Object codes are created mainly for external reporting by the Business Office (think state and federal tax reporting). Could we request that specific object codes be created for specific programs (i.e. International Student Orientation or Freedom Songs)? Unfortunately not. The budget code for both of these examples would be 5742 (Events), and then it is up to us to track spending for these programs and events independently, should we want to assess the cost of a program or event, and our ROI (return on investment), from year-to-year.

You can split costs between budget lines, either within your own department or with another department on campus. Let your Admin Support know how you would like an invoice to be paid, and you will also dictate how you would like each of your JP Morgan purchasing card transactions to be posted to your budget, by providing a 14-digit budget number on each transactional receipt that you submit every month.

Your Budget Data - A MyWhitman Overview

MyWhitman is an online portal for students, faculty and staff, with the goal of having everything we need to refer to in one easy-to-use place.

Colleague connects with the financial management component to MyWhitman, and provides you with an overview of your expenditures and how much funding you have left in your budgets.

Watch the video here for an overview of MyWhitman and the Financial Management platform therein, to better guide you on how to search for, and review, your department budgets.

Step-By-Step Guide to Financial Management (MyWhitman)

STEP 1 - Orientation

How to locate your Financial Management Overview on MyWhitman, an overview of the Finance Query component, how to filter and search for specific department budgets and/or budget lines, and how to generate a budget report during any point of the academic year.

STEP 2 - Access

Let’s make sure that you have access to your budget accounts.

Please enter the general ledger numbers that make up your budget accounts to ensure that data is populating, and that you can see the pertinent financials under the ‘Budget,’ ‘Actuals,’ and ‘Remaining’ columns.

If you cannot see all of your budgets, please email glaccess@whitman.edu to request access.

The brief video included here will walk you through how to simply enter a ‘9’ (all Diversity and Inclusion department budget codes begin with a ‘9’), and all of your budgets should auto-populate.

STEP 3 - Quick Clean-Up

A quick video [01:21] on how to hide a couple of columns in Finance Query that we (an an institution), simply don’t utilize. Here’s how to get rid of them so that you can review your budget data more clearly.

Requesting Additional Funds

Use this form to request funding from the DEI accounts managed by the VPDI (Maxwell Lecture, MISA Endowment, Undocumented Legal Defense, Mellon), for special projects and programs.

Family Connections and Cultivation Grant funds have a separate application process.