Monitoring Your Grants - A Reminder

As we begin a new fiscal year, with ongoing shifts in federal grant funding requirements, this is a great time to revisit the importance of regularly monitoring your grants. Consistent oversight isn’t just a best practice; it’s essential for ensuring compliance, protecting your funding, and keeping projects on track.

Why Ongoing Monitoring Matters

Regularly reconciling your budget to actuals is critical for managing sponsored funds responsibly and meeting federal Uniform Guidance requirements. Here’s what consistent review helps you do:

• Stay on schedule and within scope. Confirm that costs align with your project timeline and fall within the official start and end dates.
• Catch and correct errors quickly. Issues in budgets, encumbrances, or expenditures can happen for many reasons, departmental oversight, data entry mistakes, or system errors (something does not post because it failed a system check). The sooner they’re identified, the easier they are to fix. 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).
• Prevent overspending. Avoid deficits that can halt spending or require your department to cover overages from unrestricted funds.
• Verify timely adjustments. Ensure cost transfers and corrections have been made or are made promptly and properly documented.
• Be audit-ready. Keep thorough records of your review process. In desk audits, sponsoring agencies often request this documentation to confirm compliance. Principal Investigators (PIs) bear ultimate responsibility for grant funds, so departments should have procedures in place to support them to ensure that requirements are met. (A desk audit is when a sponsored agency completes an audit of the financial and internal control aspects associated with an external grant).

Tools to Support Your Review

OBI dashboards provide quick access to the data you need to complete your 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