Breadcrumb
About Inquiries
Inquiry pages are formatted pages that allow users to search for, select, and view financial information online in Finance. Inquiry pages are generally best-suited to specific document lookup rather than collection, accumulation, and analysis of data. They serve several purposes well:
- Breadth of detail about a specific document; e.g., "everything you wanted to know" about a particular purchase order
- Information about the life cycle status of a specific document; e.g., has this particular requisition been received and paid yet, and what are its associated documents?
- Drill-down from a specific accounting balance to a component document; e.g., a particular voucher that contributed to a particular journal line that contributed to a particular ledger line
Available Inquiries
Most inquiry pages are PeopleSoft-delivered. They are scattered through the navigation menu under the relevant functional area, typically under a subfolder called "Review".
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Requisition Inquiry | Purchasing-Requisitions-Review Requisition Information-Requisitions |
| PO Inquiry | Purchasing-Purchase Orders-Review PO Information-Purchase Orders |
| Shipment Inquiry | Purchasing-Shipments-Review Shipment Information-Receipts |
| Voucher Inquiry | Accounts Payable-Review-Vouchers-Voucher Inquiry |
| Payment Inquiry | Accounts Payable-Review-Payments-Payment Inquiry |
| Vendor Lookup | Accounts Payable-Review-Vendor-CSU Vendor Lookup |
To make them easier to find, you may wish to add selected inquiry pages to your Favorites folder within the PeopleSoft navigation menu.
Running Inquiries
Each inquiry page has its own unique search page layout, providing a specific set of fields upon which you may search to locate documents to view. For instance, you may specify Department when searching for requisitions to view, but not when searching for purchase orders.
Many inquiries allow you to save your search parameters under a unique inquiry name, so you can retrieve and re-use them later to search for documents.
Viewing Inquiry Results
Each inquiry page has its own unique presentation format for displaying information on a selected document.
The pages are intended chiefly for online viewing, but there are also two ways to generate additional output formats:
- Print the page via the browser’s Print command
- Download tabular/list information to a spreadsheet, wherever the yellow matrix-like Download icon is provided in the list header bar navigation
Inquiry pages are generally rich in links to related pieces of information. One common link is to Document Status. The Document Status page is available for all purchasing document inquiries (Requisitions thru Payments, in the above table). It provides a list of all associated documents in the purchasing pathway, with links to the inquiry pages for each document. Thus, the Document Status page provides several useful functions:
- At-a-glance life cycle status: how far has this purchase progressed? If the only documents listed on the Document Status page are requisition and purchase order, for instance, then the item has been ordered but not yet received or paid.
- Quick lookup for the associated document numbers: what is the purchase order number associated with this requisition?
- Quick link to details about any of the associated documents.
Document Status pages can be navigated to independently of the document inquiry pages; they reside in the same Review menu subfolders as the inquiry pages themselves.