As part of the transition to the decentralized budget model, UCR underwent a “recharge rationalization” process which transferred approximately $20M in budgets from recharge funds to general funds (19900). Of this $20M transferred to campus Service Providers, $12.2M was pulled from campus Orgs, including $6M in internal facilities recharges, and $7.7M was pulled from Central Resources.

One part of this change was to make these services available to the campus “without charge” from any of the units requesting the services, and there was no accommodation in this model for an increase in the total number of transactions. 

While the rationalization process significantly reduced the number of accounting/recharge transactions on campus, it also had the unintended consequence of materially increasing fixed cost obligations on general funds as well as the demand for many services that Service Providers now offer as core services across campus since the services were without charge and the number of requests rose significantly. The demand for these services often outpaces the level of core funding available, resulting in the need to divert resources from other core service lines.

In order to restore an appropriate balance of recharge activity to the campus, certain campus services returned to a recharge model effective July 1, 2019. As these services are returned to recharge, the Office of Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) will also return departmental funds that were taken as part of the original recharge rationalization process. FP&A will be communicating with campus CFAOs in the next few weeks regarding the amount of funding to be returned for each service.