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How many days do departments have to record activity against a sponsored project/grant after the end date?
Departments typically have 60 days or fewer after the end date of the sponsored project to record activity in the general ledger, depending on the sponsor and type of award--please read the information below. Contact your Grant Administrator in SPA or your Grant Accountant in SFR for more specific deadlines for your project.
If for some reason there is activity that belongs on a sponsored account but the deadlines have passed, contact SFR as soon as possible. The staff there can provide further guidance.
For Federal awards the University generally has 90 days to liquidate all encumbrances and submit the final financial report. In order to meet that deadline all transactions should be processed within 60 days of the end date so that the final financial report can be prepared and still allow the PI and department adequate time to review it before it is submitted to the sponsor. If departments were allowed the full 90 days to process transactions, there would not be adequate time to prepare, review, and submit the report before the sponsors deadline.
The deadlines are different if the University is a subrecipient on a Federal award. In these cases the University has 60 days to submit a final report/invoice to the institution that we received the subaward from so that they can incorporate that information into their final financial report to the prime sponsor by the 90 day deadline. For these types of awards departments would have less than 60 days after the end date to process transactions.
PeopleSoft Financials will stop any transactions beginning at 90 days after the end date.
Sponsored accounts (5/22/09)
In February 2009, Sponsored Financial Reporting (SFR) sent out a communication called Payments Received for Sponsored Projects in Academic Departments. This procedure included how to handle payments from a vendor/subcontractor related to expenses on a Sponsored Project. For those departmental deposits made against the sponsored project as a negative expense through March 31, 2009, SFR has processed a correcting journal entry resulting in the expense being picked up by the projects module. SFR will process corrections for any other deposits made between April 1st through May, 18th by this Friday, May 22nd.
Please refer to the newly published process as outlined by Disbursement Services for proper handling of sponsored vendor/subcontractor refund payments.
Processing journal entries on sponsored transactions from previous years (4/3/09)
Prior to PeopleSoft, if a transaction on a project that was recorded from a pervious fiscal year needed to be moved to a non sponsored account, SFR had to process the transactions. With the new COA and PeopleSoft, SFR no longer has to process the transactions. If an academic department needs to process a journal entry on a project related to a transaction recorded in a previous fiscal year the academic department can process the journal entry.
For non salary journal entries, the only difference when processing the journal entry is the CF1 value should be YR000020XX (the XX represents the FY of the original transaction).
For salary journal entries, if an HSA can not be processed, process a journal entry directly against the salary and fringe accounts, including the CF1 value of YR000020XX. See the Job Aid called “When and How to Use a Journal Entry to Move Payroll and Fringe” for more details.
We have fielded a lot of questions and complaints about timing of the nightly jobs, especially how the jobs impact the sponsored reports. Each module has what is called a processing box (a series of posting and updating jobs that process nightly). The GPC processing box is scheduled to start after the Purchasing, Accounts Payable, Employee Expenses and General Ledger processing boxes have completed. Then GPC starts the Cost Collection jobs which go out and cost collects the transactions from Purchasing, Accounts Payable, Employee Expenses and manual Journal Entries from GL. Then our F&A job starts followed by a series of other GPC jobs. Lastly, but not least is the copy of Production (PRD) to the Reporting Instance (RPT) which starts at 6:00 AM. This is a very tight schedule, some jobs run long and at times we are still processing the previous day GPC processing box when the copy of PRD to RPT starts. As many of know this is problematic for report users, most of the time the expense is there but the F&A isn't as the copy of PRD started before we were done with the F&A job, etc.
After reviewing several options and working with the module support team we have a long term solution to the situation. Change the GPC processing box to begin at 7:00 pm - this would ensure the box is complete by the time the copy of PRD to RPT is made and remove the dependency that the other modules processing boxes complete before the GPC box starts.
How does this change impact the academic departments? Transactions processed on a project on a Monday in the feeder modules are cost collected into GPC on Tuesday's GPC nightly processing box run which starts at 7:00 pm and will be in the reporting instance Wednesday morning. This gives consistent and accurate data and departments can feel confident that "everything" is there when running sponsored reports out of PS Reporting Instance or UM Reports.
New job aid: How to look up the Grant Administrator or SFR Accountant in EFS (1/26/09)
A new job aid has been created that shows how to look up the Grant Administrator or SFR Accountant in EFS. See the EFS-SP Web site and refer to the section called EFS Training and Job Aids.
University Financial Helpline
Phone: (612) 624-1617
E-mail: finsys@umn.edu
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