Tracking Grants: Activities or Accounting Units

Our grant volume is currently tracked in activities. We have been asked to assess why we can't track the grant activity in accounting units. We have a custom front end system that only interacts with accounting units. We would like to seek your thoughts of why we should or shouldn't move grant tracking to accounting units.

Any insight is appreciated.

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Comments

unknown

One of the biggest benefits of tracking them in activities is that you are not contrained by the calendar year. Many grant periods don't run on a calendar cycle, yet you can get YTD and LTD values in activites that you can't from the GL (which I assume is what you mean by tracking them by accounting unit). We have three accounting units of the general ledger (research, grants, funds) that have all the activity info roll up into without cluttering up the GL with all the multiple postings that activities can accomodate. You can write some good reports against the data from activities with the YTD and LTD overlapping.

unknown

Another reason to use activities and other connected modules (GM, AR, BR) is that you can run BR130 for recognizing grant revenue, and use AR & BR for your billing and cash application on your awards. The GM module opens a lot of reporting options, especially as many grant awards are at a "contract" level and you have many posting level activities below the contract level. There are also benefits for connection to cost share activities and labor distribution and effort certification.

maria-asencio

I agree with everything in the other posts. We use AC for grants, CIP, and also various projects where we just want an effective place to track expenses regardless of whether there is a specific budget or not. For grants, we have specific AUs set up for each individual grant - Title I, our activity is ****-YYYY-030-* and the corresponding AU is ***********030, so then we are able to see all TI expenses in the AU but can then break it down further with AC. I know there are differences in grants between education and medical, so not sure whether or not that type of set up would work in your situtation, but it works very well for us. We also use GM, AR, and BR and contract/posting levels.

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