PPM Grants Blog Post May 22, 2019
In addition to budgeting becoming much more comprehensive and user-friendly, the PPM Grants module will also be much more useful in maintaining information and being a reliable system of record. The current PeopleSoft system was not designed to be a grants management system, as is reflected by the lack of information within it. Aside from expenditures and drawdowns, the majority of information is kept in shadow systems and spreadsheets, and several calculations are being done externally then input manually.
In Oracle Cloud, grants will now have several tabs and locations where award information can be kept, maintained, and reviewed at any time. Contracts, agreements and other pertinent information can be uploaded and stored for easy access in the future. Other important pieces of information, such as the CFDA number, reporting frequency, invoicing frequency and due dates, special terms and conditions, principal investigators, team members and other relevant data will all be kept centrally within the PPM Grants system.
Financially, grants will also be much more accurate thanks to automated processes that will calculate burden, calculate fringe benefits and recognize revenue. All of the pertinent burden schedules are already configured within the Cloud so as to appropriately calculate indirect and fringe costs. Currently the burden and indirect calculations occur on a significant lag that may span several weeks. In the Cloud, not only will these calculations be more accurate in terms of correct calculation, but they can also be scheduled to perform on a daily basis for more timely information.
PPM Grants Blog Post April 17, 2019
The new Project Portfolio Management (PPM) module will be used for the creation and financial management of awarded grants. Principal Investigators (PI’s) and their teams will have the ability to easily see dashboards with key indicators of how the grant is progressing financially. With the assistance of the Pre-Award Grants Office, budgets will be established for all grants at the account level.
What’s great about utilizing Oracle Cloud for grants is that the budgets will be much more intuitive and user-friendly. When establishing the budget, a template will be used that has account “descriptions”. PI’s will no longer need to know the account code numbers from the chartfields to categorize expenditures for budgetary purposes. Going forward, budgets will be done with standard descriptions, such as “salaries”, “supplies”, consultants”, etc. The system will automatically map those budgets to the correct account codes for financial accounting purposes, thereby providing a more intuitive budgeting process and reducing errors that require budget reallocations.