This is how it will look in the inventory tree:
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In order to get access to CORAL, you must register at one of the labs using CORAL. Your CORAL ID is the same as your UW-issued NetID, which are given out one per person for life. Your CORAL ID will remain active so long as you are a current user of any of the labs that use CORAL.
The registration web site may be found here. You will need to choose a lab before you can register. If you like, you can register at more than one lab at a time, but you will have to fill out a separate registration form for each lab.
To gain access to a lab you must register. Alternatively, if your co-worker is already a qualified lab user, you may ask him or her to petition to bring you in as a visitor.
Most commonly, users are trained on lab equipment immediately following their registration. If you are already registered and would like to be trained on additional instruments, open CORAL's Equipment > About tab and select an instrument. Most instruments will have a Qualification link with more information on how to request training.
Use CORAL's Equipment > Reservations tab. Instructions are given in the upper-right corner of the page, above the calendar.
Alternatively, you may use UW CORAL's Lite Mode. Click the "reserve" link next to the instrument's name to pull up an agenda calendar for that instrument and click one of the AVAILABLE links to make a reservation. Be sure to fill in the begin and end time for your reservation!
Exception: The SARC lab, rather than having a calendar, presents a web form that users may use to request that work be done for them. Consult the SARC lab staff for more information.
Generally speaking, you may only use equipment for which you
have been trained. Once you have been
trained and checked out
on a piece of equipment, you may
enable the equipment on your own.
To do this, use CORAL's Equipment > Enable tab, or click one the "use" link next to the instrument's name in UW CORAL's Lite Mode. Simply choose the project and account you would like to bill to (you may have only one choice of project and/or account) and click the Enable button. This will release the interlock(s) on the instrument and start the clock against which you will be billed. When you are finished using the instrument, click the Disable button and, if you are presented with a form asking how much staff time you used or how many of certain consumables you used, fill in the form and press OK. The interlock(s) will be re-engaged and your equipment use record will be completed.
UW CORAL includes two shared drives for use with lab equipment: the M and Q drives. These drives appear on the instruments when you enable them, and are disconnected when the instrument is disabled. You can also access these drives through the web as well as from your desktop or laptop computer.
The Q drive has no time limitation, but does impose a user quota on the amount that may be stored there (as of this writing, each user may store up to 1GB). The M drive has no space limitation, but files stored there have a maximum lifetime of two weeks, regardless of their size. Because of that, the Q drive is a better choice for configuration and recipe files, whereas the M drive is likely a better choice for pattern files and images taken from microscopes.
Connect to the following file shares:
Connect to the following server:
CORAL's Equipment > Problems tab provides a way for users to make comments about an instrument, report a suspected problem, and even shut down the instrument. Likewise, you can find out what the history of comments, problems and shutdowns has been.
To make a comment, select an instrument from the tree at the
left, and press the Make Comment button. Fill in
the Subject and Message fields to indicate what
the comment is that you would like everyone to know. This will
record your comment, as well as sending email to every qualified
user of the instrument, including staff. Staff members
may close out
comments once they are no longer relevant,
but users cannot.
In a similar way, users can report problems or shut down the equipment. Problems change the icon in the tool tree, but still allow users to enable the equipment. This is commonly used when one function of a given instrument is not working properly but other functions are working normally. Shutdowns prevent almost all users from being able to enable the equipment. In both cases, staff action is required to bring problems and shutdowns to completion.
You can preview your billing through the CORAL invoicing site. The unfinalized records ("R0") that appear there are, generally speaking, current as of the wee hours of the morning, while the finalized records do not become available until the lab fiscal management has finished the month's billing cycle (often two weeks after the end of the month). Users are encouraged to preview their billing often, since it is easier to address mistakes before invoices go out than afterward.
Corrections and/or credits may be requested from the lab manager. The WNF lab has an online form for requesting corrections; for the other labs, please contact the lab manager directly.
If you are a UW user currently billing to a UW budget number, you can add an account that will bill to a different budget number using CORAL's My Profile tab. Simply click the My Budgets button, and enter the budget you would like to bill to. When CORAL reloads, the budget number you entered will be your default.
If you are a UW user and you would like a new PI to be reflected in your Project field, or if you are an external user and you need to bill to a different company, or if you are a UW user who is moonlighting for a company or vice versa, you will need to register again. The second registration should be quicker than the first, because much of the information will be filled out for you. Be careful, however, that you give us accurate information. If your second registration says the same thing as the first, you are wasting your own time as well as ours!
Generally speaking, the labs that use CORAL do not allow visitors to be brought into the lab without seeking the approval of the lab management ahead of time. You can make a visitor request in the WNF lab using this link; for other labs, please contact the lab management directly.
To request a new feature in UW CORAL, please fill in the WNF suggestions form. Be sure to mention that you are writing about CORAL, since otherwise it might not be clear.
UW Coral's reporting is divided into three sections: Activity, Billing, and Audit.
The Activity tab contains records of all user activity in raw form. Look there if you need to correct a user's time on an instrument or see when someone went through a lab door on a given day.
The Billing tab shows the results of running the raw activity through the lab's billing engine. Activity on staff accounts has been removed, and depending on the lab's billing logic, other charges or credits may have been inserted that do not correspond directly to a single activity record. Use this if you need to know what someone's bill is likely to be for this month, what the revenue is for a given instrument for the month, or wht the log book should look like (assuming staff usage is not recorded).
The Audit tab provides summaries of records meeting certain criteria; it is meant to be used to periodic auditing, though it can also be used to provide summaries of lab users or PIs, or of instrument users or super-users.
There are four different degrees of response to a given user's information: Approve, Submit As User, Do-Over and Reject user. All of these except the last record whatever changes you made to the user's input before taking the action specified.
The actions are:
Equipment can be added through CORAL's Definitions > Equipment tab. Click on Create New Record and fill in the relevant information. The most important fields are Equipment, the unique identifying name of the instrument; Lab, the lab that controls the instrument; and Area, the instrument's parent node in the equipment tree.
When a new instrument is created, no users are qualified on it, and its rates are set to an arbitrary rate of $1,000,000,000.00 per hour. You will need to set its rates before you allow users to use it.
Note too that creation of the relevant mailing lists must be done manually by the system administrator.
If you need the new supply added to an instrument's disable screen, the following procedure will accomplish that:
Prices for all of CORAL's various types of billable items are set using the Rates tab. Select the category of interest (equipment, inventory, etc.) and choose the lab and item of interest, as well as a date. CORAL maintains past price lists as well as current (and even future) price lists, so the date is a very important part of the input.
Once you press Search, you will typically be shown three rates, one for each of the three billing classes (Academic, Outside Academic, and Industrial). To close out this rate object with another rate that takes effect on a given date, press Replace. You will be presented with a dialog box showing begin and end date, setup fee, base rate and bulk rate, as well as a few other parameters. The begin date that you specify will be the end date of the rate object that you are replacing.
When you go to enable equipment, there are two fields that indicate what user is using the equipment. The first is Agent, meaning who is logged in and enabling the equipment (that's you). The other is Member, which says on whose behalf the equipment is being enabled, i.e., who is paying or it. As a staff member (or someone with the Operator role), you can change the Member field to charge someone other than yourself. Be aware that a given user may have more than one project and/or account, so be sure to charge the right one when doing work for someone else.
The M and Q drives, in addition to being available for individual users, are available, as a collection, to staff members. When you enable a piece of equipment, it is not the agent's but the member's M and Q drives that are available on that equipment, and the user can access them as described above. Staff members, however, can also see all users' M and Q drives at once, either from the web or from a desktop or notebook computer, provided it is not on the lab network.
Connect to the following file shares:
Connect to the following server:
There are a couple different ways to correct transactions. For transactions that are currently being billed, you can use the logbook tab to find and correct the transaction.
The most general way to find and correct the transaction records, though, is using CORAL's Activity tab.
First, choose the type of activity you're looking for: Equipment are equipment use records, Inventory are inventory transactions (including miscellaneous charges), and Staff are staff time charges. Select the appropriate tab, and fill in enough filter fields to narrow in on the activity you'd like to change.
Select the entry of interest using the line number links to the left of the page, make changes as desired, and press Save. The filter will reload, which usually will result in the new values appearing in the list. (It is possible, of course, for you to change the values so that they no longer match the filter!)
Charging a user for an inventory item is very similar to updating transactions, above, only you would press Add New Record instead of Search. New records will be pre-filled from the filter fields, if that will save you time.
There are several ways to charge a user for staff time, and which one is best depends on which lab you are in and what your billing cycle process looks like.
In the WNF lab, the easiest way to charge a user for staff time in conjunction with equipment use is merely to enable equipment charging the user, and at disable time, leave the Agent because field set to the default remote. This will add a staff time charge of the same length as the equipment use charge.
The NTUF lab is similar, except that users can charge themselves staff time regardless of who enabled the equipment.
Staff time can also be added after the fact, using the Billing > Logbook tab. Select an instrument and month, to make sure that the user has not already been charged for the time in question. Find the equipment use entry associated with the staff time charge, and press the +S button on the same line. (If there is no equipment use entry associated, you may press the +S entry in the header.) Fill in the form and press OK, and the staff charge will be entered into the list.
Simply use the appropriate Project when enabling the equipment. Summaries can be gnerated based on project, similar to the way that billing is generated.
To resolve a comment, problem or shutdown with equipment, use the Equipment > Problems tab. Choose the instrument from the equipment tree, and press Search. In the list of maintenance entries that appears, select one by clicking on the line number to the left of it. Check the Completed box, and then fill in the response subject and message. If you do not wish to send a message, but only mark the issue resolved in the database, uncheck the Send Message? box. (You may still record a subject and message for posterity, if you like; but it will not be sent to the mailing list unless the Send Message? box is checked.)
Use the Billing > Logbook tab. Once you have selected an instrument and a month, the use records, as well as staff time and related inventory records, will show up in ascending date order, just as it should appear in the paper log book. This allows a quick and easy reconciliation. Missing entries can be added using the +E button (for equipment use), +S button (for staff time), and +I button (for inventory items), while duplicate or otherwise undesired entries may be removed from the list using the X button. Entries can also be edited using the line number links appearing along the left-hand side of the table.
The CORAL billing cycle, from CAAMS card entries to the list of
invoices to send to Accounts Receivable, is
available here.
Depending on which lab you are in, you may not wish to start the
billing cycle until the individual equipment owners
have
reconciled the log books; the billing cycle site walks you through
the rest.
The details of how billing is performed, including what is billed, which rate (hourly versus bulk) is used when, what discounts are given to customers under what circumstances, whether equipment use is billed in preference to reservations or vice versa, are controlled by the billing logic of the CORAL backend. The only way to change this function is to talk to the CORAL administrator.
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