There are a few categories of Pending Transactions in Beacon that can be found under the Pending Tab. This article will look to explain each type of pending transaction downloaded into Beacon.
POTS
Pending Purchases, Pending Requests and Manual Orders are transactions downloaded from the Purchase Order Tracking System (POTS). These transactions help track possible purchase requests before they are submitted to NBS. Monitoring POTS data provides users additional information for upcoming expenditures to accurately manage the IC budget.
Pending Purchases
Also referred to as Approved Requests. These requests have been approved by an IC designated level, be that AO approval or PI approval. Given that these transactions may very likely be committed and obligated by the end of the Fiscal Year it will be important to monitor when a transaction reaches this level.
Pending Requests
Also referred to as Unapproved Requests. These requests have not yet been approved by an IC designated level, be that AO approval or PI approval.
Manual Orders
When a transaction is manually submitted to NBS (not directly from POTS), Beacon moves the transaction into a group called Manual orders. Because the transaction was manually submitted we can not confirm if the POTs order has turned into an obligation or not. Therefore, we remove these transactions from the Pending Requests or Pending Purchases lists to avoid double counting. Usually, if a request is approved in POTS it is ordered through POTS, so manual orders are rare occurrences. We recommend excluding Manual Orders from any formulas but reviewing the data occasionally to check if anything is there that would have to be accounted for.
Open Commitments
Orders that have been committed but have yet to be obligated. Given that these transactions will be most likely be obligated by the end of the Fiscal Year it will be important to monitor these transactions closely.
Near Real-Time (Unposted Transactions)
Transactions processed through NBS but have not yet been officially posted to nVision. Beacon downloads new transactions from NBS every 3 hours during the day. When a transaction lands here it will most likely turn into an official transaction the next business day.