Page 2 - Compass Chartfields

F I NA N C E R EF ER E NC E G U I D E

OVERVIEW

Compass is Emory’s enterprise-wide PeopleSoft Financials system used by both the University and Emory Healthcare. As a
university entity, Advancement and Alumni Engagement (AAE) uses Compass for tracking its expenditures for all departments.
Chartfields are at the heart of all Compass transactions.

CHARTFIELDS

A Chartfield is a Compass term that describes a field that stores a value. This might include values such as the Emory business
unit, the department, the account, or a fund code.

CHARTFIELD VALUE

The Chartfield value is the numbers, text, or a combination of both stored in a Chartfield. Think of a Chartfield value as a
column of data in an Excel spreadsheet.

CHARTFIELD COMBINATION

The Chartfield combination is a string of Chartfield values put together. For example, some of the Chartfield combination
values for an AAE transaction for Business School on SpeedType 0000000971 are represented by the table below.

S P E E D T Y P E B U SI N E SS O P E RA TIN G D E P A RTM E N T FU N D EV EN T P RO G RA M
UN I T UN I T
0000000971 EMUNV 60000 032030 1002 3513 0000

SPEEDTYPE

A SpeedType is a shortcut for input and accuracy that “explodes” out to populate various Chartfield values for a transaction
line, eliminating the need to key each Chartfield value independently. SpeedTypes are 10 characters long and all 10 characters
must be included when keying a transaction, even if there are zeros at the front of the SpeedType value.

When Compass first went live in September 2009, University SpeedTypes (called SmartKeys at the time
and later renamed to SpeedTypes) were sequentially assigned numbers starting with 0000000001 (i.e., by
itself a SpeedType meant nothing). A few years after go-live, the naming convention was changed so that
the first six characters of a SpeedType represents the 6-digit department ID to which the SpeedType
applies and the last four characters are a sequentially assigned value unique to that department.
Healthcare SpeedTypes have always started with the 6-digit department ID.

For example, the first SpeedType created for department 032035 using the new naming convention
would be 0320350000, the second would be 0320350001, the third would be 0320350002, and so on.

EMORY ADVANCEMENT AND ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT | FINANCE REFERENCE GUIDE | Updated 8.22.2022 1