September 7, 2023
For proper management of your unit’s sponsored funds, it is crucial that budget to actuals are reconciled on a regular basis to ensure that expenditures are charged correctly and within appropriate federal guidelines (Uniform Guidance). Here are a few reminders as to why is it important that you do this on a regular basis:
- To help ensure that costs are consistent with the project schedule and incurred between the start and end dates of the project.
- Allows you to discover any errors in your budget, encumbrances, or expenditures. Errors can be caused by the department, an end user, a data entry error, or a system-generated issue (something does not post because it failed a system check). The longer an error remains uncorrected, the harder it is to show that allowability and allocability are following our cost transfer or correction process (reminder: all payroll and accounting corrections must be done within 90 days).
- Avoid overspending, which may cause a deficit and limit further spending or require a department to absorb the over-expenditure into their unrestricted funds.
- Verifies that corrections and cost transfers have been made or are made in a timely manner and in accordance with Uniform Guidance (within 90 days).
- You must also maintain documentation of your review process in case of audit by the sponsoring agency. It is common that agencies ask for such review documentation when they perform desk audits to ensure that these requirements are being met. (A desk audit is when a sponsored agency completes an audit of the financial and internal control aspects associated with an external grant. Since the Principal Investigator (PI) is responsible for funds, departments should ensure that procedures are in place to help PI’s meet these requirements).
There are tools available in OBI that provide you with the information you need to complete these reviews:
- Grants Funds Available - This dashboard details the totals by Project, Task and Award (PTA) combination with drilldowns to Project and Award summaries with additional drilldowns to transaction detail.
- Grants Installment Status – This dashboard provides details regarding the funding installment(s) for each award.
- Grants Expenditure Inquiry – This dashboard provides multiple prompts for transactions detail and will show you transaction level detail charged to your grant.
- Effort Reporting - Use this dashboard to view the supporting payroll amounts included on the Effort Reports that are distributed by the Grants Accounting office for certification each academic term.
- There are also numerous payroll reports available in OBI to support your review of costs charged to a grant account.
We have Quick Reference Guides available for all of the OBI dashboards at this link: Quick Reference Guides | Ohio University.
For questions, please contact financecustomercare@ohio.edu .