Required reports might include summary expenditures by individual or groups of funds, detailed transaction information, monthly burn-rate analysis, and other detailed grant award financial information.
Developing these reports from scratch is challenging, often taking too much time and energy. Here are the biggest challenges:
- Unnecessary duplicate data handling: Many organizations can’t generate reports from previously entered or imported transactions. They often have to get data from different systems and then manually combine components such as budget, income and /or expenditure data, non-personnel encumbrances, encumbrances of projected personnel, F&A costs, and other descriptive information. Since this is done manually, it’s time-consuming and involves duplicative effort.
- Challenges with how information is presented: When reports are assembled from scratch, it’s difficult to separate out information like total expenses by project over a set period of time, or grouping by selected expense categories or other criteria.
- Reporting that adheres to the organization’s accounting methods: Grant reports often have to be assembled to reflect a variety of components, such as an organization’s account structure (such as project codes, accounts, funds, cost centers, object codes, program codes, etc.); attributes of the account (such as principle investigator, funding agency, organizational unit, etc.); vendor; purchasing or VISA card; and other organization-defined requirements. Assembling this level of detail is cumbersome when performed manually.
Grant management reports: a better way
Many directors, investigators, and senior administrators we team with look for a better way.
Leading research organizations rely on grant management systems that easily automate report generation and offer a comprehensive set of canned reports. With a software provider like Cayuse, the reports we offer are developed at the request of administrators and key personnel from numerous nationally acclaimed colleges, universities, and research organizations that are used by thousands nationally.
Instead of duplicate data entry, manually assembling data from various systems and files, report generation is an easy two-step process: criteria selection and format definition.
- The criteria selection step determines which records are retrieved from the database. A user simply enters criteria to define the data to be used in the report. For example, to pull the records for a single fund or project, a segment of the account structure is entered in the corresponding criteria field on the criteria selection form. A date range can further limit the data.
- The format definition step determines how the selected information is to be presented. Examples of report formats include balance views that present totals by fund or project and budget reports that summarize information by expense category or chart of accounts. Salary distributions of employees currently paid from a project can also be included on the report. Users can additionally define formats such as detailed transaction listings, tables that present expenditures by month and summaries by user defined grouping systems.
What’s key here is that report generation takes one or two clicks, instead of painful hours of manual processes!
Grant management reports: next steps
In today’s challenging funding climate, you have to make the most of your time and resources.
As you look at your grant management reporting process, contact us to learn more about how an automated solution can reduce your administrative effort and costs.
