-: Good morning everyone.
I'm just gonna give another minute or so.
I think we have 50 people signed up
so we have a few more that should be here
in another minute or so.
I have started the recording
just so you're aware that we are gonna record today.
There are a couple of things I've added to the presentation
that are in last year's presentation,
so hopefully this one goes smoothly
and we'll upload this one when it's all set.
I am gonna get going,
so I just wanted to introduce myself
and just let you know that I'm Dawn Caffrey,
I am in financial and cost accounting services
and I'm joined today by Josh
from Sponsored Project Administration.
I am gonna be looking at a screen over on the other side,
so I am gonna turn my camera off,
but I just wanted to to say hi,
and I know like kind of runs more smoothly
with everyone having their camera
and their microphones off,
but if you have any questions throughout the presentation,
the chat is being monitored
and if it makes sense to just jump off mute
and just ask a question, you're welcome to do so as well,
just when we get going, get back into mute.
So I'm guessing everybody's gonna be having some coffee
and some breakfast as we learn about effort reporting.
So this is part two of our effort management series.
Today we're gonna be focusing on the post award piece.
So last month we had part one,
personnel effort on sponsored projects.
That was really focusing on proposals
and how to include the effort commitment
in a way that gives some flexibility
and then today, like I said is part two,
it's effort verification on sponsored projects
and kind of focusing on the tools of the PI portal
to help facilitate your quarterly reviews of effort.
Today we'll go through quarterly verifications at UVM
and who should be included in that and why.
We will go through the tools in PeopleSoft,
there's really kind of two main areas.
There's the sponsored effort commitment tool
and that's really looking at the person level
and then we have the tools in the PI portal
that really looks at the project level,
so you can see everybody on the project.
I have in here demo,
but it kind of will go through demo
for each section of those.
We'll go through some planning
and considerations for what to look for
and ask during your quarterly verifications,
and I can stay after for any kind
of open lab time if people have questions
or wanna work in the system and I can stick around.
So I would recommend everybody kinda bookmark
the division of finance page,
'cause there's a lot of resources
that you can get right from there.
We have a link to the effort reporting page.
We did the cost transfer training not too long ago,
you can link to that.
You have our F&A rates, or benefit rates
and information about year end coming up
and then closing move equipment,
so there's a ton of information there,
but if you are on the division of finance page,
you can click on the effort management
and reporting link
and that will bring you to the effort management
or reporting webpage schacker
to go over some tools here.
So under key resources,
this right here is last year's presentation
and once I get this presentation captioned,
we'll have it up for you to view.
Last year's PowerPoint is up there right now.
I've added a couple of edits to it
and at the end I've added some information
about how to use ERS, the Effort Reporting System
to log in throughout the year to see the impacts
of dual appointments or directors, additional pays,
that information is also in the user guide.
We have a lot of good information
in the frequently asked questions
and again the user guide.
So you have the user guide for the effort verification
that we're going through today.
There's a link to SPA's PI portal
'cause I don't go through everything in the PI portal,
but I go through quite a bit of it.
If you're on my UVM,
you have links to PeopleSoft
which is what we'll be focusing on today,
and you do have the link
to the Effort Reporting System as well.
So conducting effort verifications,
who do we include in that?
So basically all individuals
who have payroll charged directly
or is cost shared as sponsored agreements
are included in the review of key personnel
with commitments on sponsored projects,
and the PI should be looking at anyone
who isn't key personnel as well.
So we have the semi-monthly employees
who will also certify in ERS,
which we've been doing for years now,
and the semi-monthly are the faculty
and key personnel and sponsored awards.
I did have this note here that starting in FY24, any
of the individuals who were moved from the biweekly,
the traditional biweekly to Kronos,
those individuals will start certifying in ERS this year.
And there's more to come on that when I do the training
for effort certification,
not everyone will be transitioning in FY24,
but those who do
will have effort certification forms in ERS.
We have the traditional biweekly hourly employee,
and I added this traditional year for this year because,
up until now you've had biweekly,
which included our temporary hourly employees
and our hourly undergraduate
and graduate students as well as a few people on Kronos,
so like our physical plant department was on Kronos,
so now we're gonna have any employees who are non...
I always get this wrong, so the non salaried?
Non-exempt, there we go,
non-exempt employees will be moving to Kronos.
And so the temporary hourly employees
and the hourly undergraduate and graduate students,
they actually charge
and certify their hours at the time they submit them
and they will continue to do so.
So they are not actually in
the Effort Reporting System
for certification at the end of the year,
but you do need to review their hours
as you're doing your quarterly review
to make sure that they are being charged
to the correct awards
and being updated,
especially if an award closes for one year
and you get a new project for the next year,
that those get updated
so they're charging the correct budgets
and there are no encumbrances for those,
so no budget estimates for those,
but they do need to be verified by the PI.
So here we have the Kronos hourly employees
that start transitioning next month.
They will use the plan confirmation approach
that the semi-monthly employees do,
which we'll go over in a little bit.
They will be charging actuals
but they will be encumbered,
so they are going to have kind of like
what we've been referring to is salary distributions.
It's not really salary now,
but it's basically
how they're anticipating their effort
to be distributed in the same way
we use salary distributions.
Again, they need to be verified by the PI or co-PI
and again, they will certify once a year in Kronos.
For more guidance on the Kronos employee transition,
you will need to look at payrolls page for that
and I can send out the link too later on.
And then just a note here,
so pre and postdoc trainees
and fellows, they don't certify
because the federal government
doesn't consider their stipend
to be a true reflection of effort,
but they do still need to be verified
that the stipends are being appropriately allocated
to projects and at the right amount,
usually those training awards have a specific guidance
of what is permitted in terms of the stipend amount.
So continuing on,
so commitments are in the PI portal
and the source data is entered by SPA during award setup.
So the people who have commitments
are gonna be the principal investigator,
a co-PI, anybody who's considered name personnel,
so they're named on the notice
of award document, notice award agreement
and then we also have faculty.
So any faculty who aren't any of the above,
they're not a PI co-PI or named personnel,
but we still wanna have a way for
anybody helping faculty to be able to see
their full commitments on awards.
They have more flexibility in terms of
changing those commitments,
but it's good to have a tool
to see what they've committed effort on
and so that they don't over commit themselves.
Just a note here,
so if commitments are entered incorrectly
at the time of award setup,
you should contact SPA@uvm.edu
and ask that the source data be corrected.
You will see that correction
in the PI portal the following day
'cause it's a nightly process to update that.
So individuals who do not get commitments in the PI portal
are lab techs students, other non-key staff.
So really they're not a faculty,
typically they're not gonna have a commitment
and even the pre-postdoc training fellows,
they're not gonna have commitments,
and the PI, again, is still responsible
for verifying these individuals effort
on their awards on a quarterly basis.
We'll go over the tools to do that in a little bit.
So as I mentioned before, the Kronos individuals
that are moving to the new approach
uses the plan confirmation approach,
which is what the semi-monthly individuals do.
So basically there's a salary distribution
that is set up ahead of time that indicates
where they intend to distribute their effort.
For semi-monthly it's getting allocated
as the payroll happens and in a set amount
because they're salaried.
Kronos individuals now will have
the salary distribution set up,
so it'll distribute their hours as they work them
and enter them into Kronos against that salary distribution.
So they're not going in like the regular traditional,
biweekly, temp or grad students
or students where they're entering a combo code,
so it'll default to salary distribution,
beyond that, any further questions
that'll need to go again to payroll,
but it's basically like you're planning on how
that effort is gonna be distributed ahead of time
and what they're planning on working on.
So it's important to have these quarterly verifications
to look back at the last quarter
and ask, you know, this is how we planned
on having your effort distributed,
was that really a good reflection
of your effort as it was worked
and making any corrections
to actual effort that is needed.
So if they planned on doing 50% on award A and award B
and it actually ended up being 25%
and 75%, you're gonna look back
and get that information,
having that conversation, making that change.
And then the confirmation piece
is we do an annual certification,
so it's July through June
of the proceeding fiscal year,
so that's the period that's being certified
for the effort,
but it's conducted during like late August into September,
any of the stragglers who are still working on it,
really, the deadline is October 15th,
but generally trying to get it done
by the September payroll,
and it is a web-based certification system.
And so there's a training specifically
on that at the end of August.
So anybody who's gonna be involved with that,
look for that announcement later in the year.
And the reason for doing all this
is really to abide by federal regulations.
So the uniform guidance that is currently in place
was put out in December, 2014
and focused on internal controls,
and it used what's called the COSO
or the Green Book was cited quite a bit in that.
At the time UVM did an assessment
of our approach to effort,
and we realized that, you know,
at the time UVM's internal controls really aligned
with the changes in uniform guidance at that time.
We now use a PeopleSoft commitment tool
to conduct the quarterly verifications,
which is why you're all here today.
We do the, you know, certification.
There were some updates to the IBS definition based on that,
which we'll go over after this, which is still applicable
based on some upcoming changes that we've seen
for effort or excuse me, for uniform guidance.
So we are anticipating some updates
to uniform guidance this year.
It could be any day now,
but we didn't see any real changes for effort,
and so we'll continue to do what we've been doing
'cause we've been passing audits
and it's been very successful.
So again, when uniform guidance first came out,
these were kind of some of the updates that we had.
So effort verification is done on a quarterly basis
and it's really for all employees, right?
So it's not just the principal investigator
and the key personnel.
You have to look at everybody.
but the principal investigator is now allowed
to verify the other employees on the award.
When you get to certification,
all faculty have to certify for themselves,
but PIs can certify for any of their students,
and staff on the awards
if that's what the department chooses to do,
and that's permissible.
As far as charging salaries
and wages to sponsored projects,
the importance here is that
all necessary payroll adjustments must be made
such the final amount charged to sponsored agreements
is accurate, allowable and properly allocated.
And it really goes down to
what our university definition is kind
of having a tolerance in there.
And so right out of the effort management
and reporting policy,
I'm gonna just have to read it, sorry.
The university's level of precision
of an employee's effort on each sponsored agreement
or activity shall be within 5% of an employee's total effort
of the activities included in the IBS.
And so I just really wanna kind of get into this,
and so an example here is for a quarter
that you're looking at, you charge 10% for an individual
to a specific sponsored agreement.
But when you're talking with that individual, they say,
"Oh well you know, the first month I worked 8%,
I worked 10% the second month
and then the third month I worked 12%."
You're still averaging 10%.
And so in that case the correct amount
is allocated to that agreement,
so the final amount for that quarter was correct,
and it's within the 5% tolerance.
Now let's say the employee was charged 10% for that quarter
and the communication was like,
"Oh no, I did like 4% one month, 10% the second
and then 16 the final month."
You're still charging the correct final amount
in that amount 'cause it still averages the 10%,
but now you exceed that 5% tolerance.
And so in that case, according to our effort policy,
we would expect that a distribution be updated
to correct the variation within that month.
So as long as you're within that 5%
and it's the final amount is accurate, no updates need
to be submitted,
once you exceed the 5%,
yes we expect corrections to be made to reflect that.
So again, this is one account
I just need to read. (laughing)
So this is directly out of uniform guidance.
So it was recognized that teaching, research, service
and administration are often inextricably intermingled
in the academic setting,
when recording salaries
and wages charged to federal awards for institutions
of higher education, a precise assessment of factors
that contribute to cost is therefore not always feasible
nor is it expected.
Basically the federal government is recognizing
that it's really hard to be precise
and we're not expected to go in
and have people track hour by hour what their effort is.
And so it's really kind of defaults to
what the institutional policy is.
And so they state that significant changes
in the corresponding work activity as defined
by the non-federal entities written policy.
So basically as defined by UVM, are identified
and entered into records in a timely manner.
So this is going back to what I just talked about here.
We define it as a 5% tolerance within the employee's IBS.
And so anything beyond that 5%
is considered a significant change according to our policy.
And so we would enter into the records that correction,
so do a salary distribution
and then the uniform guidance also continues on,
it says short term as one
or two months fluctuations between workload.
Categories need not be considered as long
as the distribution of salaries
and wages is reasonable over the long term.
So kind of what they consider long term
is three months or more, so.
It's kind of the dense part of the presentation. (laughing)
I just wanna briefly touch upon the 1% minimum
for principal investigators.
We did update this language a couple years ago,
so basically we're expecting that PIs have a 1% average
for the minimum on a per budget period,
so no less than 1%.
What was changed was to put this average in here,
because it isn't sufficient for somebody to say,
"Oh I have 1% during the summer month."
So if somebody's a nine month faculty
and they work 1% during the summer months on their award,
that's not 1% for the budget period,
they would have to increase their amount.
If they're only working during the summer,
they would need to increase it
because if the budget period is a full year,
which typically they are, but not always. (laughing)
If the award is specifically
for just the three summer months for start
and end date of the award,
then 1% would be fine in that case,
but if the budget period is longer than that,
you need to look at
what's the average over the budget period.
And so sometimes if they're only working
for a certain field season, they would need
to be working more than 1% during that field season.
And just also to clarify,
the 1% doesn't need to be cost shared.
I still see quite a bit of that
as a comment in salary distributions like
"Oh we need to put our 1% cost share on here."
And just to clarify, the expectation from UVM is to try
and get that to be paid by the sponsor,
so they're paying their fair share
of the effort required to complete the award.
Obviously budgets don't always accommodate that
and so sometimes it can,
I mean it obviously can be cost shared if that's approved
by the dean's departments,
but it isn't required to be cost share.
Just to touch upon some prior approvals.
So any change in key personnel on the award would need
to be communicated to the sponsor,
and so that's anybody named on the award document.
Does engagements from the project for more than three months
or a 25% or greater reduction in time devoted to the project
by key personnel would need to get prior approval.
And so really the PI should be involved
with anyone having a reduction of effort
that's key personnel on their awards
so that they can evaluate whether or not the scope
or the objective of the project
is able to be met with that change.
So I mean this isn't strictly effort
in terms of needing to get sponsored prior approval,
but other individuals reductions
or disengagements could impact to that,
so we just mentioned it here as something
to consider while doing your quarterly reviews
with your PIs.
And just a note that NH now allows effort reductions
during no cost extension periods without prior approval.
However, it does need to be indicated at the time
of the no-cost extension request when working with SPA.
The effort compliance landscape,
so there's been
and continues to be pretty hefty fines
for institutions who don't have sufficient support,
so they don't have sufficient documentation
to support the level of effort claimed on grants
and charged to awards.
So this is a list that we do not want
to find ourselves on some days.
So that's why we continue on with what we've been doing
and we've been very successful
with our current policies and procedures.
In terms of audits, there's internal audits
and investigations here at UVM.
There are uniform guidance audits.
We currently have KPMG as our external auditors.
There are office of an inspector general audits,
agency specific audits.
And it feels like UVM's always under an audit (laughing)
for one reason or another,
which a lot of times is behind the scenes
and you guys aren't aware of what we're doing
because we do have the documentation,
like, I'm constantly asked for
effort certification forms for different awards
because of, again, agency specific audits.
In terms of effort planning and management.
So reviewing effort can really inform a lot
of things throughout the fiscal years.
Obviously we have the committed effort
and effort confirmation.
We have a quarterly monitoring,
which we're talking about today, updates
to salary distributions throughout the year.
Fiscal budgeting, which we're entering in,
it's either started now
or we're going into it
in the next few days to two weeks
and your faculty workload plans.
So people are trying to take on more effort, you know,
look at what's already planned for them
in the PeopleSoft tools
so you can see if they're gonna be over committed.
Are they able to incorporate what they're proposing,
particularly for director roles, you know,
that's gotta be part of their 1.0 FTE
and so where can they reduce effort elsewhere
to accommodate those type of roles.
And so the dean's offices
can use these tools
and come to the administrators for support
before approving certain things.
So in terms of getting to the tools
to help to ask all those questions
and considerations,
so you would go to the employee homepage,
so most of you probably already default to that
and you'd click on the UVM PI portal
and oops, sorry about that.
And from there you have really two areas
that we'll focus on today,
I'm gonna start with the second menu option down,
it's the sponsored effort commitments.
And from there you can type in a department
or you can type in a person's name
or employee ID department description,
however you wanna start looking for your individuals
who you need to to look into.
And anybody who has commitment set up for them
will be displayed below in the list below,
and you can just click on them
and it'll bring you into an individual's form.
So it brings you right into the commitment
by person tab of the sponsored effort commitments,
and so there's a lot of information here
so I'm gonna start to try and break it all down.
So here in the header it's gonna default
to the current fiscal year.
I wasn't as successful
as finding like some really good examples
as I was last year,
so I did just keep most of my examples from last year.
So for now, if you go into it, it would default to 2024,
but if somebody does have a salary distribution pending
for them, as long as it was done the day before,
the system is gonna give you a note here,
letting you know that there are
outstanding distribution changes for this person.
Notes that, you know, effort reduction
more than 25% require prior approval.
We'll go over this later.
This is a button here that you can add comments.
So this is really great
'cause there's constantly changes
in personnel within departments
or kind of structures of how departments work
and manage and support their faculty.
So if more than one person is going to be responsible
for supporting faculty, we recommend putting your comments
after doing your quarterly reviews into PeopleSoft
so that they're available for whether you leave
and go onto a different position
or your department changes the structure
and now you have like a team approach to supporting faculty
and you may not be the same person always supporting
that particular faculty person,
so we'll go over that in a little bit.
But again, so it will first default to all the commitments
for the current fiscal year when you enter it.
You can type in a different fiscal year
and click limit by fiscal year.
If you wanted to look at the last year,
you can click show all year,
it can be a bit much though, I will warn you.
But then if you start looking at the information,
it's showing you, you get the award
and project, a lot of the PIs
or faculty know their project by the description
and not so much the PeopleSoft information
or the click information,
so that's here as well.
I believe there's the award description at the very end
and then there's a button here, we'll go over it later,
just go to that project
so you could see all the information on that.
The employee class,
so here you have your 12 month faculty,
sometimes you have nine month faculty,
occasionally there I think there'll be
a couple of 10 months,
but basically 12 or nine month faculty.
Your role, which will dictate whether
it's considered key or not,
so principal investigator, co-PI and name personnel.
These are your three that will default
to saying yes they are key personnel.
Your faculty role is, no.
The awarded home department is helpful
because if you're the faculty person
you're doing a quarterly review on
has commitments and awards outside of your department,
it's helpful to know which department that is
and to reach out to that department
to find out is this award getting extended
or when you're meeting with them
or with your faculty
and they say, "I'm not working on this anymore."
And their key personnel, you wanna reach out
to that administrator and the PI to let them know
that they've dropped off that award
or reduced their effort for instance.
So this kind of keeps scrolling.
So I'm just gonna go to the the next slide
which continues on.
So you would have this start
and end date of...
This is the commitment,
this isn't the award start and end date.
So this is telling you when they should be working
on the award and how much.
So 12 month individual would be calendar
and calendar cost share.
A nine month faculty will have academic
and direct Anna's cost share,
and this gives you the information on who
the PI of that particular award is.
And historically for the Effort Reporting System,
when we used that as the commitment tool, they had
to have each budget period broken out for some features
that worked in that system.
We've moved away from that,
so you'll start to see instead of each award
being set up for individual budget periods,
if the commitment doesn't change over time,
you might see one...
Sorry, I think we're getting an oil delivery,
so if you hear the dog barking, I apologize.
So what was I saying?
Yeah, so going forward you might just see
for one award it might span like five years
if it's a five year award.
So this cost share is both regular cost share
that's committed to the sponsor
or it's over the salary cap cost share.
Comments here, these are percentages
and they're not listed in person months,
so there is that difference
that we talked about in part one
of the effort trainings where it's best to commit effort
to the sponsor based on person months
because it allows for a lot of flexibility,
but once it's awarded, we all work in percentages
because salary distributions are not set up
by person months.
You know, like so the system right now gives percentages
and I know SPA's working on a new version
of Qlik that might be giving it in person months,
so there's more to come on, you know,
what tools are gonna look like moving forward,
but right now this is how everything looks here.
And again, the commitment data is available the day
after the award is set up and completed in PeopleSoft.
This is just a summary of what I hopefully just went over.
So name and id, I didn't mention that,
but that's on, on the header option
to change this fiscal year, alert is there
if there's a pending salary distribution
and a button to access the commitment page
to document your review.
So that's the comments page,
so we'll go over that again in a little bit.
The commitment data as I mentioned, it has the PeopleSoft
and Qlik number, project number, project description,
a go to button tells you the class project role,
we've gone over all of this.
Okay, so I didn't miss anything there.
The next tab over in this is distributions by person.
Again, it'll let you know
if there's an outstanding distribution
request for that individual.
It will default to the current fiscal year.
Again, my examples last year's,
this does not include additional pays,
so this is strictly salary distribution.
So if somebody has a summer commitment
for those nine month faculty,
you're not gonna see that in here.
So you're gonna need to know
what you've submitted and go into PeopleSoft HR
and look up that individual
and make sure everything that is supposed
to be submitted for that individual is in progress,
obviously when we get close to the summer months.
Yeah, you actually will have to click on this,
get payroll distributions in order to see that data.
It won't actually default in
so you just gotta click the button for some reason
and then all the columns are able to be sorted,
so you can click on any of these to sort them.
You can click on the chart field button
to see all the chart fields.
I tend to click on this button here,
which will give you all the information
you see on my screen now,
but also all of the chart fields,
but even without the chart fields,
this will give you information based on
what the function code is.
So you know, you wanna see the cost share,
you can sort by that,
but to me,
like you don't have the project number right here.
So without clicking on here, okay,
yeah this is cost share, (laughing)
but what award, oh actually no, sorry, it's over here.
I do have these red lines here.
So anybody who's familiar with salary distributions
can kind of get familiar with this here pretty quickly,
but basically this is effective start
and end date of the distribution.
So these are gonna add up to a 100%
for this UVM salary for this individual from 7/1 to 9/30.
And then it switches, that one ends
and this new allocation starts as of 10/1,
and that goes through February,
excuse me, December 31st (laughing)
and then again it switches again starting January 1st
through the end of the fiscal year.
Again, you can do a range
of fiscal years here if you wanted
or just put in the fiscal year you want,
but it's gonna default to the current year.
Another thing to look for here is
if there's anything in department suspense.
So again, you'd click on to see all the chart fields.
It's just a way, you're already talking with them.
Is there something in suspense
that should be a trigger to you?
Is something set up?
Are we still waiting for approval
for a sponsor?
Has the sponsor said that it's been denied?
Like what do we need to do with this effort
and suspense from previous quarters
and maybe the upcoming quarter?
So same thing,
we have the name employee D option change fiscal year,
additional pays are not there.
Alert if there's pending distribution.
Actually lemme go back.
So it does have a project description over here.
Oh it does include the employee record number.
So sometimes people may switch an employee record
or if they have a dual appointment,
you'll see both employee records there.
You'd probably wanna sort by that.
It does have your home department
and your percentages, so.
I've gone through all of that detail,
going back to the commitment by person page,
so we're gonna go over this add comments field.
So this will open up into a new tab
and this is where again, you're gonna wanna display
your comments about the review you just had
with that individual, especially any action items.
So for instance, like I just said,
this person's in department suspense award,
A, B, C, D has been awarded and set up,
now I need to distribute X percentage to that award.
That might be your action item
and a comment you wanna put on after your review
and be sure to click the save button.
So this is what the comment field looks like.
You can add additional comments here,
you can delete them,
anyone can delete them, so be careful
and if auditors request information,
which has started to happen, asking
for documentation of the quarterly reviews.
So if it's here we can provide it to them,
but whatever's here, we're not gonna edit.
So be careful (laughing) of what you say,
but also be detailed enough
so that you know when you come back to this the next time
or somebody else gets assigned to that faculty member
that they have the details needed to know
what action items were pending after your review
and what was reviewed during that time period.
So I mean, right now
I've only gone over reviewing effort commitments
and actual effort for the individual
for this faculty member,
but really wanna come back to this faculty member
after you've gone through each of their projects
and reviewed the personnel on them
to know if there's any other action items
and to just really document
that you have looked at each of the projects.
I'll go over looking at pending proposals
and Qlik towards the end,
but this is a recommendation of note to put in here,
so you can kind of have an ongoing list of pending proposals
and have a conversation about 'em,
and that's something you might wanna do
before you meet with the faculty member.
Just look at all the pending proposals
and their commitments on those.
Know what's coming up,
being able to have a conversation
of was it awarded?
Is it pending set up?
Do we need to get an advanced account?
And, so on.
And this is a good example of really when you're done
with the full review of individuals on an award,
what a note would look like.
So quarterly review was done,
reviewed all of his commitments and actual effort
and there are no effort corrections needed for last quarter
or the upcoming quarter for him.
Need to initiate a no-cost extension for
project 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
reviewed personnel effort on his projects,
and graduate student Jamie Smith
or John Smith is not distributed
to project (laughing) 9 8 7 6 5 4.
Notified their administrator via the notify button
in that project.
And so most of these pages will have a notify button.
I really like the one
right out of the actual project itself
'cause it gives you a link to that project
for that business manager if they want,
and so I'll show you that in a little bit.
But again, you don't get that your user data ID
and timestamp until you click save.
When I was first testing this with Susan SKoga, I was like,
"My notes aren't saving, like it's not working."
And she's like, "Are you clicking save?"
I'm like, "Well I guess not." (laughing)
Because like I said,
it opens up into a new tab
and so it's so tempting to just x out
of the tab without having saved your notes.
So that will always be my word of caution
to you to be sure to save.
All right, I am going to switch over
to showing you a demo
of that part so far.
So again, for me, I default essential user
if you don't already default to UVM employee,
you wanna switch to that.
You should have a UVM PI portal tab.
You can just click on that
and it's the second menu option below here.
Again, you can look up by department
and you'll get all of the individuals
that have had commitments set up in the past.
You'll see these are all the ones
that have had comments entered on 'em,
so you could go in
and see the commitments in the history here,
so this is a good example of using this.
And so anyone that goes to help this individual,
this PI later on has that history
and can pick up if needed.
But going back to the search,
there are some historic information here.
So you have some old individuals where...
Well not old individuals, but old commitments
from years ago when staff used to require
a direct cost justification for staff
to be distributed on an award.
And so the system sees these from long ago,
but there's nothing here,
that's why you don't see any comments
from Mindy in this case
because it's old historic information.
It's gonna list them,
but you don't need to do anything with them.
Once you start to go through all the individuals
in your department,
if you haven't already, you'll get to know,
okay, these ones I don't need to do. (laughing)
and you can also go by name.
And so again, click on any of that is all hyperlink.
And so here, like I said,
it defaults to the current fiscal year.
You have all your information.
I'm just gonna collapse this
so you can see a little bit more.
But again, I mean keep scrolling, which is why I had
to put it on two slides,
But yeah, this is the award title
I think is the only thing
I didn't end up having in there,
'cause again, that might be the piece of information
that the PI is familiar with as opposed to
the project number or the award ID or project.
You know, like they all have their different ways
of recognizing which awards they're working on.
And so again, if you wanted to see
what were the commitments last year,
you can limit by fiscal year.
So it seems like this year
there's less commitments for this one,
a little more easily able to be managed.
Oh, and I forgot to put mention this.
So project status, you can see which awards are closed,
which had an advanced account.
You can see the end date again of the commitment,
not necessarily the project.
And then you'd switch over to the distribution by person
and again, see how it defaults to this fiscal year.
You do have to press the button. (laughing)
Oh, this one now has
outstanding distribution change requests for this person.
I don't think it did last week when I was looking at it.
And so this is her entire distribution request.
So there's a lot of information here,
but you can see like this is where
it switches over from.
So July and August were the same distribution
and then it switched, there's a change in September.
So whether this busy, it might just be easier
to run the distribution and have the form in front of you,
but this is a tool here,
if you wanted to just be able to go back and forth
and say, "All right, well she's telling me she didn't
work as much on this award.
Well what did we already enter
and did we already discuss that?"
And you can just come over
and look over here to see that.
So different ways to use that.
Again, this is the comment button,
again it opens into a new page,
defaults to having a comment here.
I like to just always have more space,
just my idiosyncrasies, but you won't get that user ID
and last updated date
until you save, I'm gonna save it,
and now you see this here, it's still editable.
I don't even know if we need this edit box,
but again, anybody could come in and also delete it.
I'm gonna save that delete
because this is the (laughing) production system.
Is there any questions on really using the commitment
by person for the sponsored effort commitments tools here?
Again, we're just looking at the person.
All right, I think all the questions were answered
as we went
and then going to bring the presentation back up.
It always used to default to this screen and now it's not.
I don't know why today is different, but here we go.
So the next piece is looking at
the individuals on the project.
So the PI and co-PI are responsible
for making sure all the other individuals
on the project are being charged appropriately
and that's required to be done quarterly as well.
And so the PI portal search by project tool's
gonna give you some options for that.
So there's two ways to access the project.
You can just come here
and you can enter the project number one by one
or when you're in the sponsored effort commitment page for
that person, you can just click on the project
and it'll bring you right into that.
When you're in the the PI portal,
there's the personnel commitments.
And so this will give you the PI
as well as any faculty or other key personnel set up.
So this is where you're gonna see that
and be able to have conversations around it.
So down below you have the start
and end date of the commitment,
up here you have the start and end date of the project.
You also have the sponsor id, the PeopleSoft
and click ID and the project number.
Lemme just make sure I went through all this.
It was key faculty and keeper personnel, project role,
so it's gonna give you the role
and so it'll leave the employee class blank
if that person's no longer has active
in that employee record
or no longer has an active employee record,
and so that's a good thing to look for.
And so if in this case you would say, well, you know, okay,
well this is a really old commitment
that person's gone and Christina was hired in his place
or maybe you weren't expecting to see this be blank
and it was a key personnel and so you need to address that.
So just kinda looking for that blank there
and are there any questions that come up
based on the fact that this person's no longer at UVM
but there's a commitment.
SPA is only going to make adjustments to the commitment
if that's a key personnel
and you get prior approval for,
otherwise that's something you would just put
in your notes section that we went through earlier
of why that person is either reduced
or they're not UVM anymore
and so and so has taken over that role.
And then just kind of as you scroll on,
you'll see what we saw earlier, but for all individuals.
So you'll see the academic, the calendar
and the summer periods,
and the breakdown for that.
This I just gonna put it all on one page to see,
oh, and this is a really useful place to use your notes
because it will provide information in the email already.
So this is an example if you used it from that page,
it would actually bring you right into that commitments tab
and you could say "Please set up a distribution change
to have Christina's effort allocated
to project number before the 90 days past
the payroll has been reached."
So like it'll bring 'em right into that page
and you will also need to enter
the subject line for that as well.
But it's a just a easy way for them
to be able to see the information themselves,
and you don't have to type it all out again
'cause it's right in the email, it started for you.
All right, so effort verifications in PeopleSoft.
The objectives are to perform an after the fact review.
Yep.
Josh: We have a question in the chat.
Sarah Powell asks if you can talk about
how this data is pulled into ERS
and the commitments seem to match the employment class.
-: Lemme go back.
So the reason for this breakdown was historically
for the way data came over to ERS and still does.
So if somebody is a nine month faculty,
the programs to get the data out of PeopleSoft
for commitment data in ERS is to say,
Well this is a nine month faculty,
it's gonna look for commitments entered in academic,
in academic cost share,
and it's gonna look for commitments in summer
and summer cost share to be able
to put it into the correct places in ERS.
So if you have a nine month faculty
but you're seeing commitments set up under calendar,
then you're not gonna get the benefit
of that commitment data in ERS.
It'll come over as blank data
because it's a nine month faculty, it's looking here
but it was set up incorrectly and put in calendar.
And so when it looks for academic, it's gonna be blank,
when it looks for summer, it's gonna be blank.
And so you're gonna get blank data into ERS
for when you go to do effort certification.
And so it's a good tool for the certification
as well because it alerts you to the fact that...
Especially if somebody has zero (laughing)
amounts distributed to an award that they're a PI on
and have a commitment on, you want that alert to tell you,
oh wait, we need to have a conversation about this
before we certify your effort.
And so you really wanna be making sure here it's 12 month
that it's under calendar and calendar cost share.
If they're nine month, they're under academic
and academic cost somewhere,
because it does have an impact down the road.
And if you see it in the wrong place,
email SPA at SPA.uvm.edu.
All right, so the question was,
if someone was proposed as 12 months,
but their appointment changed to nine months,
does this mean we need to change the math and change this?
That is a good question and historically we have not.
So SPA isn't in the business
of managing data entry all the time for that.
So historically that's been very rare
where people go from 9 to 12 and 12 to 9,
but it does happen.
And so in those cases, the commitment and information,
because usually those people have a lot of commitments.
It's not just a new commitment going forward,
and so no, there hasn't been action
to go back to all the other awards
that have already been set up
and recalculate all that information
and set them up.
I mean that's been the kind of the decision.
If something's been proposed
and somebody changes before the award is awarded
and set up, I would say it would be up to the department
to reach out to SPA during award setup
and have that conversation
of how to adjust that if they want.
Keeping in mind though
that I know SPA is working on testing a new version
of Qlik that will be going to person months.
And so there are updates coming in the future,
hopefully of how that is handled
and then what the implications
that will have on the project team page
and then implications on how we handle ERS.
So like for right now, no,
there isn't a recalculation between 9 and 12 or 12 to 9.
And so the commitments information in ERS
tends to end up being blank,
which is unfortunate, but again that's tends to be rare.
Okay, those are good questions.
Okay, so objectives for effort verification
is to perform an after the fact review of interim charges,
so what has happened in the last three months
and perform a perspective review of what's anticipated
for the coming three months.
So you're really looking at a six month span,
and if you can go beyond that, great,
especially the beginning of a fiscal year.
I mean we're getting to the end of FY24 already.
I don't really know how, but you're not gonna be able
to do salary distributions right now for FY25,
although you're gonna start doing budget building.
And so you're gonna have an idea of, all right,
this faculty member has a number of awards,
or proposals out there,
what should we put into department suspense
in anticipation of those getting awarded
during budget building?
You know like, so that's kind of right now
how you can go beyond the three months,
but go as far as you can, reasonably can.
Again document the scope
of your review and resulting action items
and complete those action items.
You're gonna be preparing for your meetings with the PIs,
looking at what's proposed out there.
When you meet with them,
you'll review their individual effort,
you'll review project personnel if they're PIs,
you'll document and work on your action items,
and it's just this quarterly verification
that goes around and round and round. (laughing)
we already went over the personnel commitments.
So that's anyone who's set up with a commitment
and you can look at their distribution information,
but like I said before, the PI is responsible
for verifying non-key personnel on their award
who aren't gonna have commitments.
And so I've kind of outlined some tools for that.
So when you're in the PI portal
and if you're on the payroll information tab,
you need to click this payroll expenses to date.
And I noticed this morning actually as I was preparing,
that this takes a longer time now than it used to,
or at least an example I have today,
but also I noticed that it has over here
that I didn't notice until this morning
that you can click either sponsor paid or cost share.
I don't know if that's having any impact
on performance on it.
I don't know if anybody has been using this religiously
and seeing that,
somebody has definitely slowed down for that button,
I wonder if it's because of that breakdown,
but maybe we can put a footprint and kinda report that.
So I have one set up and already ready to go
that I can show you when I get there,
but yeah, you do need to to press the button.
What I like about this is
it has the account description right here,
but this is for the project as a whole.
It's not specifically for the budget period you're in,
so if it's at a five year award, it's gonna be cumulative.
It will give you anybody
who has salary distribution allocated to it.
But what I like about it is like you can...
I blocked out the names for this
'cause there are payroll dollars,
and this is out on the web,
so that's redacted for that purpose.
But like if you see grad student here
and they're not encumbered but they're supposed to be,
or that's your signal like
"All right, well maybe they're not here."
Or you see an old grad student
and your PI is like,
"Well no, now I have John Smith working on it,
why isn't John Smith allocated?"
So it's a great way to just have some conversations
to see if anyone's missing.
And then below that
you have the GET payroll distributions button.
Again, this is an older example,
but it's a good one that I was struggling
to find a current example that was as good,
but it will default to your current fiscal year.
You can limit it by employee ID number.
You can put in a range of fiscal years if you wanted.
Again, is anybody missing when you look at past
and future quarters under review?
'Cause if anybody is allocated,
even though they're not paid yet,
but if they're allocated for the next quarter,
they're gonna show up here,
or if they were allocated in the past
but no longer allocated, for instance,
maybe it was on advanced account
and it's been taken off advanced account
and you only see the dates up to the advanced account date.
You wanna, for some of the people
or maybe all the people, that's kind of your signal,
all right, we need to get this updated
to continue on their distribution.
You can get multiple entries
if they have more than one employee record.
And this is why I kept this example, even though it's older,
a couple years old now, but it's
'cause it's this employee,
employee not act currently active in this position,
and you can see, well there was a different role
for this person and they're now employee record five.
If you see this and maybe not the new record
but you know they're working on it,
again, a signal you have an action item
to distribute that person
with the PI 'cause PI's gonna be the one
to know if these percentages are reasonable
in relation to the work that's being performed.
And is effort distributed correctly
between direct and cost share?
So yeah, the PI is gonna review, confirm and
or request changes to the employees distributed
to his or her grants,
missing employees should be distributed.
Who should be distributed would be part of the PI's review.
So again, earlier we talked about the personnel commitment.
So this is where you would review,
compare the actual and the planned effort
and the data for the personnel commitment tab
as well as any documented effort changes
from prior effort verification.
So it's like these three tabs are all very useful
for your quarterly verification all in one place.
I am going to do a quick demo on that.
Like I said, you can go here and you can search by project
or you're reviewing with your PI, their individual effort
and then you can just go project by project
for any that they're the principal investigator on.
So we're gonna look at this one here.
So again, you can go to the payroll information tab.
I already did this (laughing)
for this project, 'cause it takes a while.
Again, I'm wondering if it has something to do with this,
but again you can see all
of the individuals and their titles on it.
This one actually just ended at the end of last month,
so we wouldn't have any encumbrances.
So if you do, it's distributed past the end date.
Also a question, you know, has the work completed on this?
Do we need a no cost extension would be a good question
to ask for this project.
I also did already get payroll distributions
just to have it loaded already.
And so like I said earlier, I like to...
oh, I timed out.
I was afraid of that. (laughing)
Well I'm not gonna do this one again
'cause you know that one takes a while,
but you can do this button here
and see the full distribution
for the individual on this award.
So I just said full distribution,
what I should say is the distribution
for this individual to this project.
So you'd have to go to
the other tool we talked about earlier
to see this person's full distribution,
but this is just showing you
what they're distributed on this project,
which it's a condensed version,
which is kind of nice to get.
And I did do a payroll detailed transaction as well.
Actually, I don't know if I went over this in a slide.
This isn't all that useful.
The only thing I find this useful in terms
of effort verification, it's useful for very many things,
but would be to maybe if you're meeting with them
during effort certification,
'cause that's now like end of August into September.
You wanna make sure if you have nine month faculty,
that their summer salaries have been distributed
to the award as you expected.
And so you could just put in a date range here
of June 1st to August 30th.
I can't talk today with dates, June to August
and run that to see who is distributed to it
for the summer months and make sure
that they were allocated properly.
I think it's actually journal date though,
so that is a caveat, it's not like it's effort dates.
So if somebody got their summer pay paid in September
'cause it was entered late, you're not gonna see it here
if you limit that by that,
but it's a good way to kind of drill down
and see to make sure effort
for summer salary was distributed if needed.
All right, was there any questions
on kind of the tips on how to use...
Oh yeah, I can't, I'm in an older one.
So this would be the project personnel for this project,
the detailed transactions and the payroll.
So that's kinda all I had to say on that.
So I don't see any questions on that,
so I'm gonna go back to presentation.
So yeah, so you wanna prepare,
you review the individual effort,
project personnel for others distributed to the project
in your action items.
So this kind of flushes out
like different things to consider
during each of those steps.
So when you're preparing,
you wanna schedule your meetings in advance.
You want to review the PI portal details
just to see if there's anything that you've identified
or emailed discussion points to the PI ahead of time,
if you find that helpful.
Review action items from the previous verification session,
maybe even pull up any award documents that might be useful,
any that might be going into no-cost extension
or like your proposals, are these awarded?
So when you're meeting with the individual
and they're going over their individual effort,
you'll do that first piece that we looked at,
the sponsored effort commitments
and look at the commitment by person report.
You'll review that for accuracy, compliance of commitments,
review actuals and future effort,
discuss if anything needs a no cost extension.
You'll review their distributions by person tab
and kind of compare that to the commitments
or just run your salary distribution
if you find that easier for the people
who have a lot of effective dates and a lot of awards.
I find the distribution form just to be easier to look at,
but it is all there in the distribution by person tab.
Have a discussion like now is a good time
to start discussing what additional pays are needed
for summer effort for the non-contract period
for your nine month faculty
and again, review pending proposals.
I'll go over that in detail of how to find those,
if you aren't familiar with that towards the end though.
So prepare, go over individual effort,
then go over the project personnel.
So as I said before,
you'd go over the payroll information tab
and you had those two resources there.
Go over the transaction detail tab.
You can use that to look for summer salary for instance,
have a discussion about additional pays
for others on the award,
because you don't wanna be surprised later on
as you get towards the end of November
and somebody's coming to you saying,
"Oh we never did their additional pay for."
And you've been relying on your budget information
and now you still owe them for that effort
but you don't have the money.
So it's a good thing to be making sure
that everybody's getting paid,
whether it's your Kronos individuals, your other biweekly,
your semi-monthly or additional pays.
Again, identify your action items for retroactive
or perspective payroll distribution changes
and then your action items you wanna document.
So one action item is to document your review.
Again, that comments button is really important.
Timely submission of payroll related changes,
email SPA, if there's any commitment set up corrections
or initiate prior approval requests,
and I think that's really more prior approval requests.
Now we probably just submitting a MOD,
but if you had questions on whether
or not you needed prior approval,
that's when you would email SPA.
Yeah, if you know for sure yes, we need prior approval,
start your MOD and Qlik and then verify
resulting changes on action items.
All right, so preparing for success
for these verifications.
So you really wanna set them up either in teams
or zoom, depending whether you're college of medicine or not
or in person and it could vary within your department.
You could have PIs that are very hands-on
and they're good with teams
and they're gonna get in there
and they wanna do it themselves too
and you can teach 'em that, great
and then you have other faculty
who really need the handholding
and need you to sit with them and go through them.
So it's really person by person based on your experience
with the faculty,
and just kind of thinking about when to do,
I mean August, September
you're working on identification midyear,
you know the next quarter, November, December,
right around now when you're starting to do budget building
and planning for the next year.
And then towards the end of the year you wanna do your final
cleanup and clear your suspense,
finalize the fiscal year
so it's ready for effort certification
and to make sure all the additional pays
are getting out there, maybe even reviewing each one
when you're reviewing the project for award closeout.
Quickly check in,
see if there's any other changes on newly set up awards
or just any effort changes that they may be aware of
be asking them,
and I'd schedule them in advance
so they're aware, you know, this is gonna happen.
We don't dictate that this is the schedule you do.
So some departments have a lot of faculty
on sponsored projects, others don't.
So the ones that don't have a lot
of faculty may follow the schedule
and do all of them on the schedule.
Others may have, like I said, a lot of faculty
and sponsored awards and do a third each month,
but that particular faculty member
is getting seen every three months.
So it isn't dictated in the effort policy when those happen,
these are just recommendations.
Again, preparing, assess results from the last verification,
identifying some potential discussion points in advance
and having supporting documentation
and really enroll your dean's offices.
So you're getting any pushback from running a faculty,
the dean's offices are well aware of these requirements
for quarterly effort verifications
and the importance of them
and they will support you on them
and our department as well.
So you can reach out to myself
or Lindsay for support if you're getting pushback.
Just kind of highlighting again,
so reviewing the individual, it must be done quarterly
for all faculty of commitments on sponsored projects.
Review all dates
and percentages in the commitment by person report
for accuracy and completeness.
Review the distribution by person details
to ensure allocated effort matches actual effort applied.
So if you're allocating 10%
and they said, "Oh no I've been actually
only been doing five for the last quarter."
You wanna update that and evaluate whether
or not reduction request is required.
We talked about comparing commitment to actual.
Yeah, and so if there is an effort reduction
in individual's role as key personnel
and they're not the PI, you need to reach out
to the PI to let them know,
make sure they're aware
because again, that could impact the scope of work,
and the PI would need to make sure they're asking
for that approval proactively.
Again, on key personnel, we talked about the tools
and the PI portal
to support that which are listed here.
Payroll expenses to date will provide the job description,
which is what I like about that one.
Compare distribution percentages
to personnel commitments percentage for any faculty
and non key personnel, discuss future effort
for each personnel the project
and review pending electronic additional pay forms.
So I think we've (laughing) talked that through enough.
So effort reduction considerations.
The PI must be involved in assessing the impact
of effort commitment reductions on key personnel
who is listed in the notice of award.
Will the scope of work have to be reduced or changed?
Will effort reduction be during a no cost extension period?
So these are questions to evaluate.
Does the sponsor have to approve?
We kind of jumped ahead here.
So if yes submit your MOD,
if you're unsure, email your research administrator.
If no, just document
the planned effort for future reference.
And again, if the answer's no, the sponsor doesn't need
to approve that 'cause they're not key personnel
or it's not a federal award that asked for commitments.
And then SPA isn't going to be updating
that commitment in the project team page
which flows to these tools.
However, if it does require sponsor approval,
it does go through that process.
The sponsor approves, once SPA gets that approval,
they would be updating that commitment
and you would see that the following day
after SPA has updated that commitment.
Josh, I think you wanted take over for this one.
You live in the world of person months. (laughing)
Josh: Yeah, well first
I just wanted to also mention that
it really is kind of rare that a sponsor actually needs
to approve a planned effort reduction.
Like once you go through all these tests
and check things almost every time
the sponsor does not need to approve it.
Like I probably send these into a sponsor
maybe once or twice a year.
I mean, certain circumstances
can cause that to be different,
but for the most part it's really not that common.
So when we are looking at whether
or not sponsor approval is needed,
we want to compare what we've committed to the sponsor
with what we're projecting,
and we're doing this in person months,
because again, we're not talking about like changing
the marginal effort.
If someone's going from 20% to 10%,
you may say, "Oh well we're cutting the REF in half."
But if they've already actually done a bunch of effort,
then that may not really be an issue.
So to do this, we're going to add the person of months
we've already applied
to the period we're looking at
and then we're gonna project the future person months
for the remainder of this period
and then we compare that to what we've committed
again for the same period.
And the reason why I'm saying period instead of year
is that if you recall from the part one training,
for a lot of sponsors, the sort of awarded period
that we're looking at can be multiple years.
So if it's an NSF award
and they're awarding three years at one time,
then what we're looking at
is that entire three year award period,
whereas with something like NIH
that awards things on a yearly basis,
then we would be looking at that one specific year.
So for calculating person months for a 12 month faculty,
you basically would multiply the number of months
that have already been worked by the percent effort
that that investigator has already been put on that award.
So, let's say in the example
we're in month seven of an award period
and, you know, the PI has put 25% effort in.
So you would multiply 7 x 25%
and then that would get you 1.75 person months
you've already worked on this award.
So then if you're saying,
"Well okay, well we wanna reduce the effort moving forward
in this award period starting in month eight,
we wanna reduce that from 25% to 15%,
well then you would basically see okay,
there's five months extra in this award period,
and so you would multiply 5 x 0.15
and you would get 0.75 person months.
So in this case, the projected effort is 2.5 person months
over the course of that year.
And so if you've committed three person months
and we are projecting doing 2.5 person months
to basically look at whether we needed prior approval,
you would say "okay, you know, for a federal sponsor,
you need prior approval
if we are reducing effort by 25% or more."
And so 75% of three person months is 2.25 person month.
So in this case we are at 2.5 person months,
which means that, you know, we will have committed,
you know, enough effort that we are projecting
to put enough effort on this award
that we will not need prior approval.
And also another thing to mention when I say prior approval,
this is supposed to be prior approval, you know,
we should be looking at a future change
and making these projections,
but obviously sometimes that doesn't happen.
And in those cases, you know, we would be looking at
more or less getting forgiveness from the sponsor
instead of permission,
and in these cases it's much, much better to ask
for permission than forgiveness.
And so we do wanna do these projections
and actually project out versus realize
that we have not committed enough effort
and need to get the sponsor to approve it retroactively.
So when you have a faculty with an academic appointment,
this gets a lot more complicated
or at least a little bit more complicated
because in these cases we are gonna be now looking at
where we are in the year in terms of
the academic versus summer, right?
There's another dimension here,
so like for example, let's say
it's a January 1st start date
and, you know, we're in July,
then you'd be just looking at that amount
of that academic period that has been worked
and then you'd be doing the summer period separately
as a separate calculation.
And so really you sort of need to do separate calculations
for summer and academic
if you are combining summer and academic.
Other times if we're only doing the summer period,
then we're just gonna be focusing on
that summer period in terms of the amount of work
that's already been put.
And so, you know, how start and end dates work,
sometimes you're sort
of combining two calendar year summer periods.
So like if an award starts 8/1
you would be looking at, you know,
one like portion of a summer academic period
and then another portion of a summer academic period
depending on how we've laid out the effort commitments.
And so just to say
that this can get a little bit complicated
when you are doing academic,
but the most important thing is just
to be mindful of the start and end dates
and what amount of an academic versus a summer period
you are hitting,
but the general idea is the same.
Dawn, you can go forward if you want.
-: All right, I just wanna check
to see if there's questions.
All right, so as I promised I said I'd show you how
to go over the proposal commitments.
And again, this all worked last week
when I checked it out in UVM Qlik
and again, I know SPA is working on an upgrade
so things may change,
but as of right now, this is what is still current.
So there are actually four different reports
you can use for this.
So when you're in UVM Qlik, you navigate to grants,
reports, customer reports,
and in the search field enter investigators on proposals
and it should bring up these four reports.
I tend to suggest these bottom two,
so you would wanna do the two.
I dunno, yeah it cluttered it up
a little bit with like the in development,
like if it isn't submitted, do you need to know about it?
That's really a decision for you guys
to kind of play around with these,
but again, these are the two that I tend to recommend,
but do what suits you.
So again, so grants reports, customer reports, input
and investigators on proposals,
and you'll see these four just to give a visual of that.
So once you do that
and you get there, you get to this example,
I picked investigator reports for PI only
and put in a PI's last name.
And so you do have to select this dropdown box.
I think it might end up defaulting to
FP number maybe,
so you wanna make sure you select PI last name
if that's how you wanna look it up.
You'll get a list
and so you have pending sponsor approval
denied or under review, I don't know.
So like look at the ones that aren't awarded
because those ones you'll find set up already
in the tools we've already talked about,
but you wanna focus on the ones
that are pending sponsor approval.
You click on the FP number
and you'd scroll down to the bottom
and you'd click on the name under working budgets.
From there on the left hand menu you click view budgets
again, left hand menu
and you click personnel costs
and you would see the personnel costs and the breakdown.
And so right now again it's percentages
but that might become mixed
or depending on, you know, what the sponsor requires,
but that's all still being worked out depending on
how the testing goes
and what the upgrade entails in Qlik.
So for now it's still in percentages that I can show you.
And so again, I would recommend you go through
all the pending proposals
and look at the commitments for that person
and enter a note.
I even put in a suggestion
to put in the role for that as well
just so you have everything here
and can just have that conversation of
have you heard anything from the sponsor on this?
And they may say, "Oh yeah, this one wasn't awarded."
So you would reach out to SPA,
to let them know this was unfunded
and to close that out in Qlik
or they might say, "Yeah these bottom two,
they were awarded
but we haven't gotten the award document yet.
Do we need to work on an advanced account?"
So those are some questions you can work on
after you have your listing of pending proposals
and then you can just copy
and paste this into a new comment
with any updates you have for your next quarter.
On Qlik does the effort need to be looked up
by each funding proposal individually?
Is there a way to look up all effort
pending for an individual?
No, so Qlik doesn't have that report unfortunately.
That's why like you do this once
and then you can run those reports real quick
and just see is there any new funding proposal
because this information isn't gonna change
in the funding proposal once it's out there
and pending sponsor review.
So if you run the report again
and you see the same for pending proposals
as you did last quarter,
there's nothing further you need to do,
you have all the information here.
If you see one more, you'd wanna look at that one,
see what the commitment is on that,
and like I said, you can either edit this comment,
add that, or copy this
and put it into a new one with the new commitment
in there for the new funding proposal.
So that's just my recommendation on how to use that
to keep this kind of an ongoing tool.
But yeah, initially you need to look it up
to get all the proposals pending in the commitments.
So discussion points related
to pending proposals, this is a good one.
Will my pending proposals affect my ability
to meet my commitments on my current,
active sponsored agreements?
And if the answer is yes, you wanna pay attention
to that award and what's their plan
if they end up getting awarded that,
they're gonna have to reduce effort on other agreements
and will that require a significant enough reduction
in other awards to require sponsor approval
or is it just a couple awards will be reduced?
Another thing,
should I communicate effort commitment changes
to the sponsor to proactively address reductions
of an effort or disengagements longer than three months?
Should I request an advanced account,
have any sponsor communicated that pending proposals
will not be funded?
So we kind of talked about those already.
So anything that needs to be updated in UVM Qlik
for pending proposals, you can reach out
to your research administrator at SPA.
And this is a new piece that hasn't...
It's been in the user guide
but I haven't included it in the presentation in the past,
but just with a lot
of ongoing conversations about dual appointments
and directors, I thought it would be useful
to present to you guys,
but not everyone here is going
to have access to this.
So really those individuals who are involved
with effort certification during
the August, September time period have access
to this in the Effort Reporting System or ERS.
And so you, if you don't have access to it, you might need
to reach out to the person in your department who does
for anyone with a dual appointment or director appointment.
So ERS contains the fiscal year, semi-monthly payroll
regardless of payment type,
so whether it's from their job record or additional pays.
So as the payrolls happen,
I'm updating ERS every payroll.
Again, eventually you'll also have the Kronos individuals
in there too, but not yet.
So you would go under reports
and then you'd click on effort on demand preview
and that allows you to see the monthly breakdown paid
to individuals
and again, only individuals assigned to your department.
And it's a useful tool
to see like Common Paymasters included in there
for any of the UVM medical center folks
and chairs of directors.
So once you click on that,
you would click on that report, you'd get a list
of all the departments you have access to.
In this case I'm just picking surgery, trauma surgery
and then there is a proceed button at the bottom
in ERS but it didn't really fit on my slide.
I didn't want it to get too small,
but yeah, click your department, click the proceed button,
you would click on the hyperlink for the individual
and there's purposes I've blocked out (laughing)
the identifying information for the person,
but you would click on the hyperlink here.
I think their name might even be a hyperlink,
but then it will bring you into what you're used to seeing
for effort certification for the initial view.
And so this isn't all that useful
and so you'd wanna click on
the total salary information hyperlink at the bottom
and that will bring you into the monthly breakdown.
And so here you have somebody who has Common Paymaster
for UVM Medical Center
and that's not gonna be on their salary distribution.
So their salary distribution
is gonna be broken up by these three here,
but you wanna see the impact
of the Common Paymaster here
or if they're a chair
and they have two different salary distribution breakdowns,
you wanna see the impact of both of those.
Again, if they have an additional pay
that would be added in down here as well.
So this is just a tool, another tool
to see those people
that are a little more complicated knowing
that they have dual appointments
or something non-traditional that
you can't just compare straight commitment percentage
to satellite distribution percentage,
and you wanna see the impact.
So again, this is updated throughout the year.
You can see this is current
and this is effort payroll through February 29th, 2024.
And I mean it's typical October you see all your college
of medicine clinical faculty I think it is that have
their distribution percentage breakdown change
because that's the fiscal year start for UVM Medical Center.
You'd also tend to get changes during January
because that's when the salary cap tends to become effective
and a date change with that.
So just different things to consider by using ERS,
and you would also have access to that
for any of your grad students.
So just going back to this report,
it's gonna list anyone in your department
who would have an effort certification form
based on commitments and or effort.
So somebody could have commitments but no effort yet
and they're gonna have an effort form
or anybody charged directly
or is cost share to sponsored agreements
will have an effort form
and once they're generated for the fiscal year,
but you'll see them all listed here
so it's another tool you can use.
It's not as widely used,
'cause again it's not available to everybody
like the PI portal is, which is why we switched
to using the PI portal
because it was getting the traffic
and it has a lot more flexibility for more people
to have access to it.
So again, prepare, review your individual effort,
review project personnel, have your action items
and that's your kind of quarterly verification
that goes round and round.
This preview data does include commitment data, correct?
Yeah, actually that is correct too.
So if there are commitments it'll show up here
and there are drilled down information
so you can see how that's broken down by direct
and cost share I believe,
yeah and I think there'd be a icon here
that would show you if there's cost share,
but anybody who hasn't taken
the effort certification training,
this is gonna look pretty foreign to you (laughing)
because there is a parent account
and then this is the child account.
So the parent has the commitment,
the child has the like the actual effort
and so these two lines here are tied.
So right now I see this has a 1% commitment
but there's nothing being allocated to it.
That's a conversation to have should there be,
is this right here, this suspense in money,
should some of that be allocated
to this project perhaps?
So those are discussions you could have
if you're familiar with this,
but it's just another tool that can be used
for anybody with commitments and effort throughout the year.
Yes, Sue put that year
our fiscal year period
or yeah are they?
So right now this is taking into account
the portion of commitment that falls in
the current reporting period.
So yes Sue, that's a really good question.
You're gonna have more visibility
and understanding of what the commitment is,
I think if you use the PI portal tool,
because this will annualize.
So say somebody had a 10% commitment
but only six months of that award
fell within this current fiscal year,
it's going annualize it to 5%
because when you look at it for the reporting period
of this fiscal year, total it's supposed to come out
to 5% because it's 10% for six months.
So that is another consideration to use.
The main point of this training really
is to use it for drilling down
to see the impacts of dual appointments
and additional pays in the monthly breakdown,
but the video is up, it is a long one
but we'll get into the details
of all of that in that training.
So if you aren't familiar with that,
reach out to me
and I can can walk you through
if you think it'd be helpful,
but we're not gonna focus too much on that right now,
but it is a very good point so thank you Sue.
So are there any other questions?
For reporting effort
and FTEs on progress reports for nine month faculty,
would you convert their distribution on the project
to a 12 month appointment?
Josh, do you have any insight on that?
I've never worked with progress reports
and I don't know,
I'm guessing that might be sponsored specific?
Josh: Yeah,-
Participant: USDA often often goes FTEs
on their progress reports.
Josh: So for USDA specific,
like you're talking about the one that's in,
oh my gosh, I forget what it's called, report, right?
Participant: Report, yeah.
Josh: So first of all
I don't think that that is considered
to be like an official reporting of effort
because if it was we would wanna review it.
Well what I would do is
I would convert everything to person months
because a person month doesn't matter
if someone's a 9 month faculty or a 12 month faculty.
That's what I would do for all of these.
Dawn: So convert it to person months
and then back to FTEs.
Josh: Does report not allow you
to report in person months?
Dawn: No you have to enter FTE
for each of the groups,
and I get this question a lot in Cals
'cause we have a lot of USDA awards.
Josh: Well yes, there's various ways of doing it.
One way of doing it would be to convert to person months
and then use that to figure out
what percent of a 12 month period someone worked.
There are other ways of doing it
if you don't wanna make that conversion,
but that's a pretty easy conversion,
so I would just probably suggest doing that.
Dawn: Thank you.
All right Alex had for joint UVM Medical Center faculty,
is there another type of account
also called a commitment account
for the UVM portion of their pay?
I'm not sure I understand.
Like I know that there's the Common Paymaster
for the UVM medical center,
then there's like UVM pay
and then there's the Common Paymaster
is kind of the way I've always referred to it as,
but am I understanding your question correctly?
And you can take yourself off mute
if it's easier to just...
Yeah, so you're saying that there is another one?
I mean in my mind there's two job data,
two job data records in PeopleSoft.
And I've always just referred to the UVM side,
but in either way like bullet distribution,
well the Common Paymaster doesn't even have
a distribution, the hospital side,
it's just the amount that goes to them
and then you allocate the UVM portion 100%
on the just salary distribution, so.
But if other questions come up,
definitely feel free to reach out to us.
You can either contact cost accounting or just me directly.
If you have any feedback you wanted
to give on this presentation
or the tools, we're happy to hear those.
We do have again, the effort website.
We have overviews, there's policies, effort verification
user guide that walks you through this.
This presentation will go up as well.
And again, once I get this captioned,
we'll get this on there as well.
It'll just replace the one that's on there
and then there's some great FAQs there as well.
So be in touch if you need us.
And then if you wanted to stay after
and do anything here for like walking through any of these,
the great thing about the team's presentation
is you kind of can walk through it as you as we go,
so I'm guessing a lot of you did that as well,
but feel free to reach out
or stay after if you would like.
I am going to stop the recording though,
and thank you all for coming.