Lisa Silbernagel, finance and accounting manager in HSBC and Kelsey Herman, finance supervisor in FOBC, have been working with OSRAA and IAR to create new grant reports in CORE designed to help all business centers identify potential problems on grants as efficiently and proactively as possible.

  • Report #1 is now live (report number RES0065) and allows the user to retrieve all grants for an org that have payroll budgeted but none expensed.  This will help identify grants in aggregate, as opposed to reviewing them one at a time as they come up in the reporting queue, or when something else triggers the inquiry, for which we might have missed redirecting payroll.   The report creates efficiencies to identify grants with this issue and supports proactive response to corrections before inaccurate reports are issued and/or inaccurate PARs are distributed or omitted.  In the instance that the grant work has not yet begun, business centers can use the information to reach out to the PI to verify/notify business centers when the work commences, by whom an at what level of effort.

 

  • Report #2 is in the development stage.  This report will allow identification of grants nearing their end date which have a specified balance parameter (i.e., balance greater than $10k).  This creates efficiencies to more quickly identify in consultation with the PI, where expenses may have been missed or if the project is just anticipated to come in under budget.  Another scenario the report will assist in identifying is if the work is behind the anticipated schedule, thus necessitating a no-cost extension request with the principal investigator proactively.  It is anticipated the report reflect payroll encumbrances only through the grant end date, so that the balance data does not reflect encumbrances that are outside the project period, as those should not be factored into the estimated available balance. 

Next steps include development of reports that identify, in aggregate for all grants within a specified org, unmet cost share, ending balances for fixed price awards, and any charges posted after the project end date.  Efficiencies are projected by being able to identify the full population meeting the specified condition in a single report.

Expense Verification Tool

Last Updated: 
12/03/2020