[Dawn] I see Josh is here.
All right, so I'm gonna get started.
Thank you all for joining me this morning.
This is Part 2 of our Effort Training Series
and this one's Managing Effort on Sponsored Projects,
and the first one was more focusing
on the proposal stage.
So this is focusing more on how to manage effort
once the project has been awarded.
I'm Dawn Caffrey and I'm the Senior Cost Accounting Analyst
in the Financial and Cost Accounting Services office
and I'm joined by Josh Tyack
from Sponsored Project Administration.
Oh, this is just a quick list
of everybody in Financial and Cost Accounting Services
and we cover a wide range of responsibilities
for the university,
but in terms of what I've tend to work with most of you on
is effort and space survey.
In the past there was some capitalization for some folks.
That has been taken over by Renee and Reiko,
and you probably work extensively with both of them.
I have the organizational chart
for our Sponsored Project Administration.
I know they had a few vacancies a while back.
I'm not sure if any of those have been filled,
but I know some of you here joining,
quite a few joining us today are part of SPA or SPA 2.0,
so thank you for joining us.
This is a listing of all of SPA EDU's sessions for this year
and you'll see the last one that they offered was last month
on Valentine's Day, and that was Part 1.
As I mentioned, today we're on Part 2.
I do ask that for the main portion
of the presentation that you stay on mute
and even keeping camera off.
I meant to put mine on earlier just to say hi, but,
and generally broadband kind of just works better
with video off and just allowing for the presentation.
Feel free to put any questions in chat
and Josh will be monitoring that for us today.
You can use the hand-raise feature to jump in
and Josh will let me know,
and 'cause we do wanna have a dialogue too
when questions come up, but just in general,
just to, if we're having any morning breakfast
or anything like that, that we stay on mute generally.
And if I don't answer your question now
or you come up with questions after the fact,
feel free to reach out to me directly
and we can address those.
I know we have some questions coming up
that hopefully we can get to in April
about some effort for internal projects,
and so there's some ongoing discussions
that come out of these types of trainings.
And I am recording the presentation today
and I do plan to update the website with today's training,
'cause there is some added information
about converting between FTE, or excuse me,
the person months and percent effort,
and we'll get to that later in the presentation.
That's really the only difference
from last year's training though,
which is on the website at this time.
So for today's agenda,
we'll be going over for quarterly verifications
who at UVM needs to be reviewed and why.
We'll go through the PeopleSoft tools.
So we have the PeopleSoft Sponsored Effort Commitment tools,
which is looking at your faculty members
who have effort on sponsored projects
and looking at them individually.
And then later on we'll look at the PI Portal
that has been around for much longer
and how to use the information there
to assist with reviewing commitments
for all key personnel and faculty on awards,
as well as looking at your non,
your bi-weekly individuals
who don't necessarily have salary distributions
and aren't gonna be set up with commitments,
kinda like your lab techs and grad students.
I have demo down here after the fact,
but I really will kind of jump in
during each of these upper areas,
just to walk you through it
and not rely just on the screen prints.
I just find it a little more useful.
After that, we'll go over,
really kind of reiterate the planning and the considerations
that you should have during your quarterly verifications.
And then I'll stick around after the fact,
so if anybody wants to play around in the system
or has any other questions that didn't come up earlier
or that we need to circle back to,
I'll be available after that.
If you go to uvm.edu/finance,
you'll see all the areas
that the Division of Finance oversees
and we manage the effort management and reporting policy,
so you can click on the link there under our services
and that'll bring you to our webpage for this.
You'll see that the training from last year, again,
is available now.
I will update that.
It'll probably take a couple weeks
to get the presentation transcribed
and, well, to have the closed captioning added to it
and to get any sensitive data,
like employee IDs and names, blurred out
so that we can make that a public presentation
for viewing whenever you need.
The Effort Verification PDF or the slideshow
is up there from last year, so you can follow along.
For the most part I have made some changes and updates,
but I will get this one updated on that website
soon after today's training as well.
I've just been making updates as we go
right up until the training today.
Down below you have an option,
you can go look at the Effort Policy,
but I do also open up here and show you
that you have the Effort Verification User Guides,
so not just the presentation we have today.
There's a pretty sizable user guide
with considerations and FAQs
and there's also a user guide for the PI Portal in general
and that actually links back to SPA's website.
As I mentioned, the tools we're gonna be using
are in PeopleSoft and most of you are in there anyways,
but if you're new and you're not familiar with it,
you can go to myUVM.edu if you're already using that
and you can get to it from the Financials.
And just as a reminder, we do the effort certification still
in the Effort Reporting System, ERS,
and that's just once a year,
and we used to have the commitments
and certification in ERS,
but after March of last year,
it's just the certification that gets done annually in that.
So today we're talking about quarterly verifications,
and so, again, we're in PeopleSoft.
So conducting effort verifications,
who are we looking at when we're doing this?
So it's really all individuals who have payroll charged
both directly or as cost share to sponsored agreements,
including a review of any key personnel
with commitments on sponsored projects.
So you wanna make sure
that they're meeting their commitments
that they've communicated to the sponsor.
Effort verifications are required to be done
for both the semi-monthly employees
and the bi-weekly hourly employees,
so the faculty, so for semi-monthly faculty
and key personnel,
and they will have sponsored effort commitments
and a page to review those.
And there's a note here that semi-monthly employees
will continue, as I mentioned, to be certified in ERS.
There is the move to Kronos
and I really can only say right now
there's more to come on that.
We're still working on how that's all going to work out
and so there isn't guidance right here
in this presentation today, so that will be forthcoming.
For the bi-weekly hourly employees,
the actuals are charged and certified
at the time they're submitted,
so they're not being certified in ERS on an annual basis.
They're doing it as their hours are entered,
'cause they don't have a salary distribution
that's kind of planned effort.
It's just actual effort.
It gets submitted and charged to the budgets
they're supposed to go to.
And those do need to be reviewed quarterly as well
to make sure what was charged to the awards was accurate
and it can be reviewed by the PI and the co-PI
for those bi-weekly hourly employees.
You're not gonna meet with them to confirm their effort.
The PI can do that.
And just a note here that pre- or postdoc trainees
and fellows that receive stipends on sponsored agreements,
they don't certify, but they are still required
to have their charges verified on a quarterly basis
to make sure that the correct statement amount
is being charged and they're being charged
to the correct awards.
Continuing on, let's see who we're talking about.
So commitments are in the PI Portal
and the source data is entered by SPA
during the award set-up,
and commitments are set up for the principal investigator,
co-PIs, named personnel.
So those three are all your key personnel,
but any faculty that are non-key on an award
are set up as well.
And really, the idea there is to have a place
that you can see all commitments
and manage all of their effort on sponsored projects
in one place.
And if commitments are ever entered incorrectly
at the time of award set-up,
you should contact SPA@uvm.edu
and ask that the source data be corrected.
Once they've confirmed that the correction has been made,
you'll see that update the following day,
because that's just how the PI Portal works.
It looks at the information.
I don't know if it's midnight or what,
but it is an overnight process, which is kind of nice.
It's not real-time, but you're not waiting weekly
like you used to have to do in the Effort Reporting System.
And I will hopefully touch
and remember to touch on it later,
but, like, if there's changes that somebody,
when you're doing this, and the PI said,
"Oh yeah, I committed 50%,
but I'm only able to do 45 and that's what I've been doing,"
you're not emailing SPA in that instance,
'cause that's managed internally within your department
with the PI.
You wanna document that as a note for yourself,
but you're not contacting SPA if it was set up correctly
but you're just having a change in effort
that doesn't exceed a threshold
that requires prior approval.
So just to make that clear, that they're not in the business
of micromanaging the efforts along the way.
It's set up and whatever the commitment to the sponsor is,
that's what the system will tell you.
Again, the PI Portal will not have commitments
for lab techs, grad students,
non-key staff.
Again, non-key faculty will, but not staff,
and your pre/postdoc trainees and fellows
do not have commitments set up,
and their payroll is actually, again,
excluded from effort reporting.
You will see it in the PI Portal though,
but it's not gonna have a certification form
at the end of the year.
The PI and the co-PI is still responsible
for verifying that their effort and payroll charges
are accurate on a quarterly basis,
and we'll go over how to do that.
So for the semi-monthly individuals,
UVM uses the plan-confirmation approach,
so the plan meaning, you know,
you're budgeting and monitoring the effort
and adjusting it accordingly.
So you're gonna establish an update like your effort plans,
like your salary distribution.
That's what your planned effort is for the year.
Their salary is going to continue to be charged each payroll
based on what that planned distribution is
until anything is reviewed and determined,
excuse me, that something needs to be corrected.
And so that's what's really happening
on those quarterly verifications, is,
"Okay, you planned to do this,
this is what we said when we met last quarter.
We distributed it to the award based on that conversation.
Did your actual effort during that quarter
reflect what we had charged to the award
and what you'd plan to do, or do we need to make changes?"
The confirmation is a one-time-a-year certification
each year, so you're looking back July through June,
and that's our certification period,
and going through the process to review that information,
compare it to any commitments, and certify and document
that that was an accurate allocation of your effort,
and that is done in August and September.
So it's that one time a year
versus the quarterly verifications
which is ongoing throughout the year.
And this is in accordance with the Uniform Guidance,
and really, the Uniform Guidance talks about,
here, I'll actually go to the next slide,
the Uniform Guidance talks about,
it's a really big focus on internal controls.
So it doesn't explicitly state
you need to continue to do effort certifications
like it had prior to Uniform Guidance,
but all of our peer institutions
are still continuing to do effort certifications
and we really haven't seen any deviation from that,
because it provides that internal control,
and how we would meet it otherwise has really been,
isn't tested yet, 'cause nobody's deviated from that.
So UVM will continue to do so
until we see any other institutions deviating from that
and going through a solid audit cycle
and seeing what happens,
'cause the risk is pretty great
to move away from that approach.
So that was kind of the outcome of that
and that's been really since 2014.
We're approaching, what, 11 or nine years,
and institutions across the country
are still doing it this way.
And it's because we've felt
that our own internal controls aligned really well
with the revised Uniform Guidance,
and the PeopleSoft commitment tools
are helpful for making sure
when we get to that annual certification
that everything is accurate and hopefully ready to go,
unless anything was set up
really right before the certification period.
Other than that, it should hopefully be clean
and easy and ready to go.
And there was an update to the IBS definition
to exclude supplemental pay for overload.
So that's really your,
used to be continuing ed,
now it's professional
and continuing education PACE courses,
and we updated our guidance
to say that the PI and the co-PI
can verify the reasonableness of effort and payroll charges.
This is more specifically the language
in the effort policy that was updated.
So yeah, again, quarterly basis
and the effort will be reviewed on a quarterly basis
for all employees and not just the PI,
not just the key personnel, but all employees,
but the PI can review that information.
In terms of accuracy, the other piece that was updated
is that all necessary payroll adjustments must be made
such that the final amount
charged to the sponsored agreement is accurate,
allowable, and properly allocated.
But the federal government does understand
that there is going to be fluctuations.
They're not expecting us to go in every payroll
and update each payroll.
So if, for instance,
for the quarter that you're looking back at
the plan was to charge 10% to the grant
and to work 10%,
and when you have your quarterly verification
and you talk to your faculty and they say,
"Yeah, you know, one month I did 8% on average,
the next month 10, the next month 12,"
over that three-month period, it still averages out to 10%,
and so you can leave that quarter.
You're still accurately charging the sponsor,
so that final amount is still the same,
whether you do one month at 8, one month at 10,
and one month at 12, or three months at 10%,
as long as there's no major, no changes in the salary,
the IBS, the institutional base salary, during that period.
And this is the language in the policy
that allows us to do that.
So, "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
on the activities included in the IBS."
So this was the example I just walked through,
that you charged 10 but you fluctuate between 8 and 12.
But it would be different if they said,
"All right, I didn't work one month,
I worked 10 the other, and I worked 20 the third month."
That still averages to 10 over the three,
but you're beyond that 5% threshold,
and so that would require you to go in
and make a salary distribution change,
because you're exceeding that threshold
and need to go in and make that change.
Okay, just wanna see if,
so just, it looks like I had question.
Is that addressed or should I jump into that at all?
[Josh] You can add more if you want,
but it's basically about summer pay and IBS,
and we touched on this a bit
in our Part 1 training as well,
but yeah, Alyssa, if you still have questions,
feel free to ask, but.
[Dawn] Yeah, so it becomes part
of their total pay for the year,
and what they can get paid in the summer
is based on their contract period,
but it does become ultimately kind of part of,
for effort purposes, it becomes part of the IBS,
and even the effort policy does state
that our use of IBS
may differ from other uses
across the university in terms of,
you know, strictly looking at how it may be worded
in a faculty contract, for instance.
But it has to use the contract rate
from the nine-month academic period
to pay out for the three-month summer months,
and it does become part of the IBS that gets certified.
Did that advance?
Oh, this is language directly from Uniform Guidance
and it's kind of along the lines of what I was saying before
and I'm just gonna read it word for word, unfortunately.
So, "It's 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 costs
is therefore not always feasible, nor is it expected."
And so that's basically saying
the federal government understands
that we're not doing time sheets,
we're not tracking hour by hour,
and so they understand
that you're gonna have those fluctuations.
So in that last example, I'll go back,
they understand that, you know,
this is gonna change over time.
We're not expected to make changes each payroll
and that, you know,
we're getting as precise as feasible.
You know, it is difficult.
We understand that and they do as well.
And because of that they go on to say,
"Significant changes in the corresponding work activity,"
as defined by our institution,
"are identified and entered into the records
in a timely manner."
So our definition, so,
"defined by the non-Federal entity's written policy," is 5%.
If you're within 5% and there's that fluctuation,
you're okay, you don't have to make that entry,
but if you exceed that 5% and you say you do 0% one month,
10% the next, and 20%,
yeah, it still averages out to 10 for the quarter,
but you've exceeded that threshold
and so you do need to make an entry
into the payroll distribution process
to get that changed in a timely manner.
The Feds consider the short term as,
you know, one to two-month fluctuations
and need not be considered,
so we're abiding by that with our policies.
I just want to touch quickly on the 1% minimum
for principal investigators.
It's not for all key personnel.
It really is specifically for principal investigators
to ensure that they are not overcharging other awards
and that, at a minimum, they are allocating some effort
to each sponsored project
and that ideally it's not cost share
and that the sponsors are paying their fair share
of the effort that is required
to get that scope of work done.
And I did wanna point out that, yeah,
we did change this maybe two years ago at this point,
(chuckles) or maybe longer, kinda lost track of time,
to clarify that the average,
it must average no less than 1% per budget period.
And that is hopefully able to clarify,
so, like, if you're not,
if you only have a three-month award,
then it only needs to be 1% for those three months.
It doesn't need to be 3% of your total annual salary
pushed into those three months.
It's looking at that budget period.
Conversely, if you have a 12-month budget period
and you're only doing 1% for the three months,
that's not meeting that minimum,
because it's not averaged over the budget period,
so you're falling below that 1%.
More from Uniform Guidance.
So the times you need to get sponsor prior approval
are gonna be for changes in key personnel
specified in the award document on the Federal award,
and really looking at any award, too,
for terms and conditions, even if it's non-Federal.
And then disengagements from the project
for more than three months,
or a 25% or greater reduction
in time devoted to the project by key personnel.
So those are the two things that need prior approval
from the sponsor.
And I do put down here a change in the scope
of the objective of the project or program.
And yes, it's not effort-related,
but it's a good mention here,
because when you're working with your faculty,
they let you know that, all right,
the PI or the co-PI
will be disengaged from the project for six months,
or the PI needs to change
'cause the original PI is leaving the institution
and not taking the award with them.
You wanna lead into that conversation of,
well, does that mean
that there's gonna be a change in scope,
and trigger that conversation with them,
'cause they may not think to ask that
or think to get sponsor approval on that.
So it's just a note to think about that as well.
And the reason we're kinda all meeting today to go over this
is 'cause we don't wanna find ourself
on a list like this.
So there's a lot of really steep fines
that institutions have found themselves dealing with
in response to really lack of internal controls
around effort compliance,
and we've luckily (chuckles)
have had good audits with it
and so we're gonna continue to keep on keeping on
(chuckles) with what we have
in our policies and our procedures.
[Josh] Hey, Dawn, do you mind
if I jump in for a second?
[Dawn] Absolutely.
[Josh] So Rhonda has a question
about the sort of 5% accuracy
as it relates to a sub-project
on like a larger Federal-sponsored project,
something like a Northeast Air award.
My assumption would be that, like, yes,
we would ask for the same level of accuracy there,
even though we're not,
we don't have the same
prior approval responsibilities for something like that.
Can you comment?
[Dawn] Yeah, so I'm not sure
I'm gonna get to read all this real quick,
but in terms of, like,
I know there's a conversation right now
about stuff that isn't charged to the award.
So this doesn't necessarily mean
voluntary uncommitted cost share,
it doesn't say it's required to be charged to the award,
either as direct or cost share.
So I think, I'm wondering if it's related to that,
-because as a university- -[Josh] No,
this is more like if there's, like, when, you know,
like a capacity grant sub-project
or like a Northeast Air sub-project
where we have like a competitive award
that we've set up internal to UVM,
where there's a project director
that runs a research project
that also has to certify their effort.
My assumption would be that, yes,
we still request the same level of accuracy
as we would if they were the PI
on a standalone sponsored project.
[Dawn] Yeah, I mean, if it's being charged
to a sponsored project,
regardless of the mechanism, it needs to be accurate
and there is that 5%
kind of threshold that's...
But going back to that, you're still making sure
what is charged overall is accurate,
but it's the swing between the months,
or even within a month,
that you don't necessarily need to make,
like, the salary distribution change
to correct the individual months.
Either way, it needs to be the accurate total
that gets charged.
So anything beyond a 5% swing
needs to be updated and corrected
with a salary distribution change
or wage transfer, if it's bi-weekly.
I mean, actually I'm gonna take that back.
That's actual effort worked,
so it needs to be charged where it was worked,
so it's not a distribution change.
So yeah, just semi-monthly at this time.
And Rhonda, if that doesn't answer your question,
I know I'm gonna be meeting with your group
for some stuff on SARE in a couple weeks,
so that might be something we can talk about further, too,
if I'm not understanding correctly.
(indistinct) just in terms of audits at UVM,
we have internal audits and investigations.
We have the Uniform Guidance single audit,
and that, right now, our auditor is KPMG.
We also do get an Office of the Inspector General audits
and then agency-specific audits.
So there's a lot of audits (chuckles) going on out there,
and so our internal controls
have so far been sufficient.
Moving.
So effort planning can really inform
a lot of different things,
so we're talking really about reviewing committed effort.
I believe you guys just went through fiscal year budgeting
for next year in Axiom,
so you can use the information
from your effort planning to help get
basically your salary distribution set up for next year
by what you load in Axiom,
can inform your faculty workload planning.
Again, we have our quarterly monitoring that we're doing
and, like, effort confirmation commitments,
and even when they're submitting proposals,
they can look to see, "Well, am I already over-committed
and what adjustments am I gonna need to do
if I were to get this award?"
All right, so now for the, like,
how to use the tools in the system.
So for the PeopleSoft tools,
you're gonna need to be in the Employee homepage.
I think most of you probably default to that.
I'm not sure, maybe SPA gets,
actually, SPA is probably Central, so you'd,
and I'll walk through this too,
but so if you're on the Employee homepage,
you click the PI Portal tile.
Oops, sorry. (chuckles)
You'd select the Sponsored Effort Commitments menu option
on the left.
So the first option on the left
is your traditional PI Portal information
and this second one down
is the Sponsored Effort Commitments.
This is where you're gonna get the information
to review the individual faculty members'
commitments and distributions.
When you click on that menu option,
these search boxes will appear.
You can search for everything,
for a particular department,
or you can search for the particular employee's name.
I think it's helpful
to really be adamant about putting in comments
into your faculty's
effort commitment forms,
and then, if you just search by department,
you can sort by last comment date
and that way you can, it'll help organize you of,
well, who have I not met with this quarter,
based on your comment date,
and who do I need to meet with next?
So that's just a process that I would suggest.
All right, now, getting into,
once you search for an individual
and you open up somebody's form,
this is what will open up.
So it's gonna default to the current fiscal year
and you can click Show All Years,
or, if you wanna look at last year
or you wanna just look at what's coming up for 2014,
excuse me, (chuckles) 2024,
those are your features there.
And actually, I skipped over this.
So there's two tabs when you come into this,
for the individual commitments by person.
And so you wanna look at their commitments
and then you can also toggle back and forth
to the distribution,
so I'll get to that tab in a bit.
But looking at the commitment by person,
if there's already a pending distribution in process,
there's a note here that shows you
that there are outstanding distribution change requests
for this person, which is just nice to know
right off the bat when you're in here,
like, "All right, well, I know another project got set up,
I can't do that distribution change
until this one's either processed,"
or, if it's a day after the payroll,
maybe to ask Katrina to send it back
so you can make this change as well, for instance.
You'll see it has the UVM award number.
So this is the UVMClick award number
and our project number,
the project description set up in PeopleSoft.
This button will bring you
right into the PI Portal for that.
We'll get to that in a bit.
It will give you the employee class.
In this case, this example was a 12-month faculty.
And so generally you're gonna see 12-month or nine-month.
There are a couple other non-12-month options out there,
but those are the two main ones.
And this will drive where your commitments are set up under,
when we get to the next screen,
just 'cause it could not fit in one screen here.
You have the project role,
which will dictate whether the person
is key personnel or not.
So here I have highlighted the three roles
that are considered key personnel.
So the principal investigator,
a named personnel, and co-PI.
And so the named personnel is not a PI, not a co-PI,
but they are named in the Notice of Grant Award,
and so if there's any changes to that person's effort
beyond the 25% threshold or the disengagement piece,
they would require sponsor prior approval.
And then faculty is the non-key,
and you'll have the No, the N for no for key personnel.
It'll tell you the awarded department.
So this is just helpful.
So if there needs to be communication
with the department administrator
of the home department of the award, like, you know,
has the no-cost extension been processed?
I mean, you should be able to see it here too,
but it's just good to have that right up front,
of where the department is housed
or where the award is housed, in which department.
And so this is,
if you had continued to scroll right,
it would give you the project status.
And then these dates here are the commitment dates.
And so the Effort Reporting System
we used to use in the past
used a lot of logic behind the scenes
that needed to have the award commitments broken out
by budget period,
and so that's gonna phase out
and slowly you'll start to see maybe something set up
for a five-year period,
and so you'll have less rows of data as we move forward
over the next couple of years,
but you'll still see some legacy information here
that was broken out by budget period.
And I will note that these
are set up in percentages, not person months.
So going back to last training,
we really focused on kind of driving on the point
of putting your proposals in with person months,
because that provides a bit more flexibility,
but in PeopleSoft, we work in percentages.
You know, the salary distributions
need to go in as percentages,
so that is converted when it's set up.
So really, if you go in here and you see anything
that's set up that doesn't look correct,
that's when you would want to reach out
to spa@uvm.edu to say,
"This isn't set up correctly,"
and get it just done right away
and use this going forward once it's corrected.
And so I talked earlier
about the 12-month
and then the non-12-month appointment types.
So 12-month is gonna show up in Calendar column
and Calendar Cost Share.
The Calendar Cost Share is going to be your true cost share
as well as any salary cap,
so that would be combined here.
And then your non-12-month appointments,
mainly your nine, some 10,
are gonna be in the Academic and Academic Cost Share,
or, if they have specifically a summer commitment,
it would show up in the columns here.
There is a bit more information.
I didn't put it in here.
I think, like, the long sponsor's title is there
and maybe something else as well,
but for the purposes of this, that was getting too long,
so we kept it there.
And again, the data is available
the day after the award is set up.
And so this is just recapping
kind of what I've just showed you.
So the header of the page is going to have the name
and then the employee ID,
options to change the fiscal year or show all years,
alert if there's a pending distribution change
in process for that individual,
and a button to access the commitment page should, oh,
I didn't show you that, so,
but this is why I have this page. (chuckles)
So up here, this is what I really find
to be kind of critical going forward
and it's gonna be a big push,
'cause auditors are asking for,
external auditors are asking for information
on quarterly verification documentation,
and so we'd have to go back to the department
and collect that from you.
And also, you have department administration,
department administrators changing,
whether it's just a reorganization in the unit
or somebody moving from one department
or college to another,
or somebody leaving the university,
or even just somebody going out on a medical leave.
And so if the quarterly verification documentation
resides with an individual,
you can't have others just step in and help
when those quarterly verifications come up
for the faculty the next time,
so I'll go over how to use this feature.
So you just click here, it opens up a new tab,
and you can enter your comments there.
And so anyone, so, caution,
anyone can see those comments,
but it's really useful so that anybody in the department
can see those and help that faculty member out
should somebody else need to be stepping in
in that role in the future.
And then the commitment data, again,
has the UVM and the PeopleSoft award number,
project number, and description, and award title,
has a Go To button, or Go to Project button.
It gives the employee class,
project role, and if they're key or not,
awarded department, oh, and yeah, the PI name,
the start/end date of the commitment,
again, not the start and end date of the award
or the project, the start and end date of the commitment,
and the commitment percentages.
Again, still looking in
this menu option
for sponsored project commitment,
you can now compare to the distribution by person,
and this is really feeding off of the same functionality
that's already in the PI Portal,
to just show you a summarized version
of the salary distribution,
but this way you can just toggle back and forth
to be able to see or compare
what they're distributed as or at for a particular project
and compare it to the commitments by person.
Again, it defaults to the current fiscal year,
but you can change the range of fiscal years you wanna see.
It does not have additional pays included on this.
This is strictly just the distribution.
And a note is displayed,
again, if there's an outstanding distribution.
You do need to click the Get Payroll Distributions button.
It doesn't default open for some reason,
but that's kind of similar
to how the PI Portal features as well.
And all the columns in that,
you can sort by all the different columns.
You have, so this is what it would look like.
You'd click the Get Payroll Distribution button
and you'd have this open up.
So it's gonna give you this summarized information.
You could click this tab and get the chartfields.
I don't find that to be all that useful on its own,
so I generally tend to click this button
to just expand it all if I wanna see the chartstrings.
And just like anything else in PeopleSoft,
it has the opportunity to download to Excel.
And same with the Commitments by Person page.
That did too, I just forgot to mention it.
And both tabs, all of these are sortable columns.
I tend to really just sort
by Distribution End Date,
and I put the lines here
so you can see this distribution was everything
for 7/1 to 9/30.
I didn't update an example for today's presentation.
I apologize, (chuckles) this was from '22,
and so this is...
You guys, if you're doing distributions,
this probably is familiar to you.
If you're not and you need help with kind of seeing
what this really means,
we can go through that in more detail at the end,
kinda like the open lab time,
but just giving you different chunks of time
and how it's allocated.
You can sort by project,
if you wanna just focus on one project at a time.
That's another option as well.
And it's nice, too, it gives you the function description,
so you can tell right here if it's cost share or not
instead of trying to rely
on the actual chartstring function code.
Again, just to recap and make sure
I touched all the points,
so the header on that page has the name and ID,
options to change the fiscal year or show all,
again, additional pays aren't listed there,
and an alert if there's a pending distribution request.
It'll give you the project and the description,
oh, and the employee records.
So it does have that here.
So if somebody has multiple records,
you can sort by that as well
so that you can just see that,
each one individually,
and sometimes it might be one is inactive,
and there would be a message here
if that person is no longer employed in that role.
You'll see that in an example later on.
Okay, the home department, effective dates, percentage,
functional description.
Oh and then, so looking at the chartfields,
it's always a good place to just look
to see if you have any department suspense
when you're doing your quarterly reviews
and just see, you know,
all right, why was this effort put in suspense?
Were we waiting on an award and was that project set up
and we now need to do a distribution
to move that to the project?
So that's a good conversation to have
by looking at just the chartfield.
Okay, so this was getting into using that comment box
that I went back and mentioned earlier.
So you wanna document the scope of your review.
Again, we'll get into looking at the project as a whole
and looking at all of the individuals on the award,
and you wanna document that as well,
but again, for purposes of what this page is,
I'll just leave it there for now.
You wanna list any action items that have resulted
from your quarterly review.
You know, "We're missing our grad student on here.
We need to get their distribution updated.
They're in a different department
and I let that department administrator know
to submit a distribution to allocate that grad student
to our project," something like that.
It does open up in a new window,
and be sure to click the Save button. (chuckles)
It's so tempting to just close out of that tab,
and it doesn't save automatically,
so there is a Save button.
This is an example of what I mean by that.
So you'll open up a text box.
You will need to drag the box down.
It just opens up for one row of data and just drag it down.
It's not an unlimited amount of data that you can put there,
but I've been able to put paragraphs there
and it'll save it, so you're not really limited
in the number of characters
for the most part. (chuckles)
I don't think you'll reach that limit.
But you're not gonna get your user ID and timestamp
unless you click the Save button,
so it's kind of one of your indicators
that you need to save instead of just exiting
out of that screen.
Even when I was working with Susan Skalka to develop this,
(chuckles) I would put in my notes in the test environment.
I'd go back in and there'd be no note there.
She's like, "Well, did you save?"
And I'm like, "Well, I guess not," (laughs)
because I would just close it out,
so I can't stress that enough, 'cause I did it many times.
All right, for that, okay.
So I think I'm just gonna quickly show you,
I'll just kinda walk through it as well
just to make it a little bit
more relatable and you can actually get into the system.
So again, for me, I default to the Central User
and if I go to the Employee,
that's where I get the access to the PI Portal tab.
You're gonna come in.
It's gonna default to the PI Portal's
Sponsored Project search page,
but we wanna look at the Sponsored Effort Commitments.
And so let's,
and you have all these different options you can search by.
I'm gonna say give me
everything for this department,
and oops, that's not the one I wanted.
So here we can come in and, again,
you can sort by the last comment date,
and so these are all the individuals, you know,
that have been reviewed this quarter,
and who else is left, who should I meet with next?
I will point out that you have some of these individuals
who are staff.
So this is kind of legacy information that is there.
And so, like, for instance, Mindy,
she is a department administrator
and we used to have the Direct Cost Justification form,
and the process was anybody
who was going to be direct charged to an award
who is approved by SPA
to be charged to it, their commitment would be set up,
just as a way of knowing that SPA had approved that
and it was okay to do so.
Anybody who hadn't been set up
really shouldn't have been direct charging.
So some of these individuals are old
and they don't really need to be reviewed anymore,
but you will see them,
so just kind of getting in to know some of the names
that you don't need to actually review,
which is most of these in this example.
And then I'm gonna just pick a different one for my...
Again, you can type in by name.
You can open up into their form
or their commitment page.
I'm gonna just close this so I have a larger area,
and so you can see, it just scrolls right across,
and so, yeah, after the principal investigator,
I think it was cut off here,
so you do have the long title for the award,
which some faculty member
are familiar with your project title,
some are familiar with the award number for Click
versus the sponsor title.
So it's all here,
so you just have to keep scrolling
to see how do they best identify with their projects.
You can, again, if I wanna see next year,
I can enter that date and limit by fiscal year.
Here's what carries over to next year for that,
and you can do Show All Years.
You're gonna have a lot of closed projects as well,
and I'll just go back
to the limiting by the current fiscal year.
So again, this is one way to get...
So say, all right, I've looked at the PIs
or this individual's commitments.
Now I wanna go look at the personnel
on her projects that she's a PI of.
You can just go right into it from here.
It leaves this page open
and it brings you right into this page,
and we'll go through how to use the tools on this page next,
but I'm gonna for now continue to focus on this page here.
Again, you have your button to open up a new tab
to start entering your comments.
Again, I just, I like to have a big space when I type,
so you can just put that here and you can just say,
I would be doing testing,
I am in a live environment, so I'm not gonna save it.
And if you want, if you have other...
When you come in here,
after you have a comment and...
Actually, I don't remember if it already defaults
to having one or if you need to press the + sign,
but that's how you would do it if you need to.
And once it's saved, you can also edit.
It's available and anyone can,
so even if I saved this
and one of you came in here later,
it's still editable by anybody else.
And once you, so let me go
try to do one of the things I did.
I just came in here with one of these.
It's gonna show you how many comments actually exist already
and you'll see that there.
And so, yeah, so it doesn't default to having a box open
if you already have one saved,
so you would just need to add another one
and it won't contain your saved information here
until you actually save it.
And another nice thing you have for all these pages
is the Notify button.
(Dawn mutters indistinctly)
I'll get to that in a later tool,
'cause it's more useful somewhere else.
So I think that's all.
Oh, and then the Distributions by Person.
And again, you'll just have to press the button
in order to bring that data up.
You have the chartfield information,
but again, if you just click on this,
it'll show you everything and you can scroll
and see it all and you can download it.
Right, I think that's all I'm gonna show for that
and go back to the presentation.
Got it, right.
And so now, like I said,
there are two ways to get to a project,
so let me just start back.
If you've already done
all of your review
for the PI or if you just wanna do the PI
for a particular project,
then go to that project for the personnel,
that works too,
and you would be able to go to the PI Portal,
Search for Projects page,
and enter in the specific project there.
Or you can, if you're already in their page,
you can, like I said, click the Go to Project button
and it'll open that up.
When you're in the project page,
you can go to the Personnel Commitments,
and that's, there's a tab there,
and it's going to list any faculty
that have commitments.
It'll list their role, whether they're key or not,
and it'll give you their employee class.
The header on that page has the award ID and the project,
the sponsor award ID,
and then these dates here are, as it says,
project start and end dates.
Down here is where you're gonna get
the commitment start and end dates.
And you'll see here that this individual
no longer has an employee class.
That's kind of your signal to know
that person's no longer employed here
and maybe have a conversation at the time.
Obviously this is old, but, you know,
if that's something new since the last time
you reviewed this with the faculty member or,
excuse me, with the PI, find out,
"All right, does this person leaving,
is there somebody else that's working in their place?
Does it change the scope of work
to not have this individual?
Was he or she key?
Do we need to get sponsor approval
before the end of the budget period?"
Those conversations should occur at that time.
And this just reiterates everything I just told you,
(chuckles) but it's there for your reading purposes
if you go through this later on.
And then, again,
it lists their commitments out.
If you were to scroll right
from what I was just showing you,
and again, it's the same way you were seeing it
in the individual's form.
Now everything for the project
and anybody who's listed will,
it'll present it the same way,
based on whether they're a 12-month faculty
or a non-12-month,
unless I just put it all on one page.
And here's where I was saying
I find it to be more useful for the Notify button.
Hold on, I just need a sip of water.
All right, sorry about that.
And so if you use the Notify button from here,
it's kinda nice because it automatically gives you a link
directly to that page.
So if you see that there was a faculty member
outside of your department
that is supposed to be working on the award
and they're not distributed and you need to reach out
to the other department administrator,
you can do it from the Notify button there.
It gives you then the link directly into the page too,
if they have access to that.
And then you can put in your text.
You would have to fill out the,
you know, what's the subject line
and what's the text of your message.
But in this case, "Please set up a distribution
for Christina's effort allocated to this project
and please do so before the 90 days past the end date,
or past the payroll date has been reached,"
just so it's timely.
So really, the objectives of effort verification
that we wanna go through
is performing the after-the-fact review of interim charges
for the past three months.
You wanna look at what's coming up
in the next three months
and how we need to adjust any of your salary distributions,
or different grad students, for instance,
so having that perspective conversation.
I mean, really, three months or longer, if you can.
I mean, right now we're getting,
we don't have three months until the end of the fiscal year,
I don't know how that's happened already,
but, (chuckles) I mean,
if you're at the beginning of the fiscal year,
how far out can you have that conversation,
just to reduce the number of changes you need later on?
You wanna document the scope of the review
and any resulting action items,
and you wanna complete those action items
in a timely manner.
So, I mean, that's really the essence of what's going on
during your quarterly reviews.
And so, really, you're preparing
for the meeting with the PI,
whether it's looking at action items
from the last quarterly meeting
or looking at what's set up since the past meeting,
what proposals they have submitted,
and we'll go over this in a little bit more detail.
We're just kind of talking it through.
And then you'll go over the individual effort review
for that person
and then you'll look at the project
and look at all the personnel on that project
and make sure everything is accurate
or if anything needs to be changed.
And then you'll have your list of action items
after the fact,
and you just kind of keep going through this cycle
each quarter for that faculty member.
And just to dig in a little bit more
for the effort verification by project,
what I just talked to you about
was really this personnel commitments
and I was showing you how to see the faculty commitments
on the project, but you really also need to be able
to look at your non-key personnel effort on there,
and they're not gonna have commitments.
So these are your lab techs,
your grad students, your temp employees,
any of your student wages.
I'm gonna give you, I mean, these aren't tools
that were developed for the purpose of effort verification,
but you can monopolize on what was already there
for this purpose
and it's all in one spot here for the PI Portal.
So my suggestion would be go to the Payroll Information tab
in the PI Portal by project,
and I would click the Payroll Expense to Date.
This is only useful to an extent,
because this is for the whole project,
it's not for a particular budget period.
But I like to be able to see all of,
like, the account descriptions.
It's kind of like what type of employees you have
on your project, so,
and that'll help give some information
as you look at who is currently being charged to the award.
So below that, so when you're on this tab,
the top section is Payroll Expenses to Date,
and then below that you have this Get Payroll Distributions,
right below it.
And so you're gonna also, again,
need to click on that button
and you'll get your payroll percentages.
It's by fiscal year or you can change the year,
have it span multiple years.
You can just look at that particular individual if you want.
There is useful information here.
What this tells you,
this employee is not currently active in this position,
which I mentioned you'd see
when we looked at something earlier.
But you wanna kind of look at the distributions here
and you can compare it to the commitments
and see, are the commitments...
So Jason, in this example, had a 1% commitment
and he has distributed 1% and it's as cost share.
Does that match his commitment or was his commitment 5%?
Is he meeting the commitment?
So have the conversation around that,
but also having the conversation
about all of the individuals on here
so you can see if somebody's missing
or have ask, you know,
"All the individuals we're seeing here,
here's how they're distributed.
Do you feel this is an accurate reflection
of how much work they're allocating to your project?"
And so above, again,
you could see, all right,
well, we had a grad student
and we had a temp wage employee.
The temp wage employees aren't gonna have distributions,
so then you're not gonna be able to see them here,
but you can see if, all of a sudden,
"Well, we had a grad student,
but I no longer have a grad student distributed to this,
but I know we have one working.
Why am I not seeing here?"
So that's kind of a conversation to have,
to figure out is somebody missing.
So that's how I find it useful
to look at who has been distributed
on the project as a whole up above
versus currently distributed.
And again, comparing those salary distributions
to what is in the Personnel Commitments page,
just to see if there's anything that needs prior approval
if somebody is below what they should be committing.
So again, we kind of just went through this piece here,
the project personnel,
and the first tools we talked about
were the individual effort review.
We just talked about the project personnel,
just covered any of your action items,
and you, again, go through that process,
and this is just a more detailed view of those steps.
So in preparing,
you wanna schedule your effort verification meetings,
and so quarterly, and we don't dictate
that you need to do everyone in the same month.
If you have a large department,
you may do a third each month
and every month of the fiscal year
you're doing doing them,
but they just cycle through every three months
but on a different cycle.
You'll wanna review the PI Portal details
and identify any discussion points ahead of time
or email them to the PI even.
It's up to you.
Just have them ready or email them in advance.
You wanna review action items
from the previous verification session
and make sure they got processed
and then identify any key documents
to facilitate your verification discussion.
So do we need to look at any award documents
or proposals to see how the effort
was proposed to ensure,
well, we know we had a reduction on a particular award,
how was it proposed?
Do we need to get sponsor approval?
So that's kind of your preparing section.
Going over your individual effort review.
So you would review that Commitments by Person report.
You review for accuracy, compliance, commitments,
actual and future effort,
and then, you know, have that conversation.
Do we need any no-cost extensions?
Do we need to request or submit a MOD for anything
for one of those?
Compare to the Review Distributions by Person tab,
by award or project,
to ensure they're meeting their commitment
and/or if they need any prior approvals.
Look to see if anybody
needs any Additional Pay forms submitted.
And actually, and then,
so I'll just finish this,
so review pending proposals in Click.
And so I will go over that in a bit,
how to actually do that,
but I want to
show you one more thing.
(Dawn mutters indistinctly)
If I just go to a project,
this is where I was talking about,
so getting the Payroll Expense to Date,
and you can see the employees
that are allocated to it
and you can get their distribution.
But the Transaction Detail,
if you come into this page,
you're gonna see, and you click on this,
you can do a certain range
and you can do a name if you wanted to do that,
but you can see, I mean,
it's not gonna have percentages.
So it's really just,
all right, is this person getting distributed?
And so this is where you're gonna see
any of those individuals
who don't have a salary distribution,
so your lab techs, no, not your lab techs,
your temp wages,
student salaries, oh, what was the one we just saw,
but at any rate, your bi-weekly employees.
They're not gonna have salary distributions.
So you could see who's being distributed here
that wouldn't have a distribution.
I also like to recommend this for, say,
in the summer months,
or, like, right after the summer month,
you're in September,
you're starting to do your effort certifications,
even when...
That's a recommended time to do these verifications.
Put in your summer month ranges and get your payroll
and see if everybody you anticipated on the project
for an additional pay form for summer effort received it,
especially if you have people from a different department,
because you're not overseeing it,
you don't know if it's pending or not.
You wanna make sure that it hit here
and that it's not outstanding.
So there's just a lot of different ways
to use the tools here to make sure,
especially, that nobody's missing
when you review budgets versus what actually got charged.
All right, so going back to...
So that was,
so we went through preparing the details on that,
the individual effort review.
Now we wanna look at the non-key personnel,
really, all project personnel.
So you do the Payroll Information tab
that we've just been discussing.
I just showed you the Transaction Detail tab
and how to kind of use it
to look at the summer salaries
and look at any of the bi-weekly individuals
and if anybody's missing
or if anyone's accidentally getting charged to your award,
'cause they perhaps typed in the wrong combo code.
If you don't recognize somebody,
have a conversation about that
and determine if any Additional Pay forms are needed,
and then identify any action items.
So that's kind of your non-key
in, really, project level,
to make sure that's all complete.
And then your action items.
Document, as I've shown you before, any action items,
and document, really, the scope of your review,
and timely submission of all those related charges,
Additional Pay forms, distribution changes, wage transfers.
You email SPA@uvm.edu to initiate
any prior approval requests
or really probably even do the MOD for that
or set up corrections that you may have found errors on
for recently set up awards
during your quarterly review, (chuckles) excuse me.
And then verify resultant changes from action items, so.
And then planning or preparing for success.
So you really wanna schedule the meetings ahead of time,
even if you go ahead and, for each faculty,
set up each quarter
at the beginning of the year for the full year,
so you have all those ahead of time.
I mean, a great recommendation
is to do your first review during effort certification,
so that you're already meeting with them.
It's one less time you have to meet with them.
Look, in either, you already, really,
in September typically to do that,
so you're pretty much a quarter into the year,
so that's a good time.
And then, you know, mid-year,
we just passed the budget building time.
That's a good time to do this,
so it kind of informs you
of how to set up your allocations
for the faculty in Axiom.
Kinda May, June, end of the year,
clearing out suspense,
making sure additional pays are set up
for anybody who has summer salaries.
That's another useful time to be looking at this.
And I know SPA sends out reminders
for when awards are about to close,
so that's a good time to maybe even off-cycle
look at a particular faculty's awards.
I know it's at least within 90 days of a project closeout.
I think they have other reminders as well,
but that's a good one.
Again, scheduling these in advance.
Prepare for it, so really assess the results
from the last verification.
Identify any potential discussion points in advance
so you're really making the best use of your time
during those meetings
and having any documentation you need readily available
right out of Click.
And if you're getting any pushback from the faculty
to really understand the importance of this,
you know, you can enroll the Dean's office
or your department chair.
They understand the importance of this and the requirements
that the PIs have to fulfill
their terms and conditions for accepting the award
by meeting these policies,
and you could also reach out for us
and our departments as well.
I just really kind of summarized here again, (laughs)
so I think I've kinda gone over this a few times already,
but, you know, conducting the effort verification
by the individual.
It must be done quarterly for all faculty
on sponsored projects.
Review dates and percentages and the Commitment by Person.
Review the distribution details
and compare it to what their commitments are.
Compare commitments to actual and planned effort
and make any corrections,
and if there's any effort reductions,
and then individual's role is key personnel,
you would need to contact SPA
and really submit your modification,
I believe, to get that prior approval started.
And if the individual is a PI or co-PI,
they would need to review personnel
on their project as well.
These are the tools we discussed for the non-key personnel.
So running the Get Distribution Detail percentage
or Get Payroll Transaction Detail by name.
That was the first piece in the project
I kind of went through.
Payroll Expense to Date
will provide the job description.
Like, personally I just find that useful, (chuckles)
as I've said a couple times.
Compare distribution percentages for your faculty
and the key personnel as well so they can,
and it's the PI's responsibility
to make sure that everybody gets prior approval,
so you're relying on any key personnel
to notify the PI, but the PI should be reviewing that too.
Discuss future effort on each personnel by project
and review pending electronic Additional Pay forms
or any missing ones, too, after the summer,
as we've talked about.
-Effort reduction- -[Josh] Hey, Dawn.
[Dawn] Yeah?
[Josh] Next time you have the demo open,
can you actually show us
how to see the Additional Pay forms?
[Dawn] So you can't see Additional Pay forms.
They're not in the system,
but what I was saying is,
let me bring this back,
so when you're in here, it's not gonna,
it's, like, this only has distributions, right?
This will tell you any salary that has been charged
based on any individual, regardless of how it's charged,
whether it's wages, salary distribution,
or Additional Pay form.
The transaction detail, this is gonna give you by payroll,
so Get Payroll Distribution Details.
So that's why I'm saying, like, in September,
just limit this to your summer months
and look at the faculty that are on here
and hopefully you would know
which ones are expecting an Additional Pay form
on your award and just make sure that they, like,
compare your budget to this.
Like, there isn't anything
on the finance side of PeopleSoft
to show you what additional pays are pending
or even submitted.
It's just, it'll tell you what's been paid out
for that individual, regardless of mechanism.
So there is in the job aid for,
or the, yeah, the user guide for effort verification,
I think it's under the FAQs
of how to see Additional Pay forms in PeopleSoft,
but that is only on the HR side.
So effort reduction considerations.
So the PI must be involved in assessing the impact
of the effort commitment reduction of the key personnel.
So the PI and their administrator
would look at the Notice of Grant Award
and have a discussion
on whether or not the scope of the work has changed.
Really, even looking at the proposal,
how was the commitment proposed,
and determining if a reduction request
is required for the sponsor.
And then the PI would also be the one to determine
if the effort reduction is during a no-cost extension period
and the impacts on that.
And so does the sponsor need to approve?
If yes, you'd submit a MOD request in UVMClick.
If you're unsure,
you would email your SPA research administrator,
and if you know that the sponsor, no,
does not need to approve,
you just document the planned effort for future references
in your comments box
in the PI's form
and the faculty member's individual form as well.
Timely communication on all of this is important.
And if you do submit
for a sponsor prior approval of a reduction,
SPA will update the commitment percentage, in that example,
once the sponsor has approved
and you would see it in PeopleSoft
the following day after it has been changed in PeopleSoft.
And I can't get it to move.
There we go.
So Josh, I'll hand it over to you.
You live more in the person months
to percentage world.
I pretty much live in just the percentage world,
(chuckles) so I'll give that to you.
[Josh] Yeah, no, I'm happy to help.
So basically here's the calculation that we do
when we are looking at whether or not
a sponsor needs to give the okay on something.
So basically we need to compare what was committed
with what we are going to project
using, like, a potential effort reduction.
So you basically, you look at what person months
someone's already worked on the award
and then you add the projected future person months
for the remainder of whatever period we're looking at,
'cause if you recall from the previous training,
this could be, you know, a effort that we're looking at
on a year-by-year basis.
It could be effort over the course of the entire award,
like a multi-year award.
And so whichever one of those
is what we're looking at here.
And so how we calculate,
the easiest to look at this is for a 12-month faculty,
and so you look at whatever number of months
you're looking at times the percent effort.
And so in the example I have here,
let's say you have a PI who is seven months
into a period,
and in that seven months they've committed three,
or in the course of the award period,
there's a three-month commitment.
So PeopleSoft would show that 25% that's, you know,
three person months over the course of a 12-month period.
And so you would multiply 7 x 0.25 to say that this person
has already worked 1.75 person months.
And then you're looking at the other way,
then you're looking at
what a remaining period would be.
And so let's say this PI wants to reduce to 15%,
then you would say, well, the remaining months
are five months left on this award period,
so it's 5 x 0.15, so that's 0.75 person months.
So in this case, the projected effort
would be 2.5 person months.
You can also sort of flip this around a little bit
if you want to do it as the,
if you wanna look at how large
of a reduction someone could have
before needing to trigger
a prior approval request.
You can basically do the math backwards a bit as well
and look at...
Hold on, I had my math here, but I moved it someplace.
Basically you can say, like,
75% of three person months,
and you would subtract the 1.75 person months already worked
and then that would leave you
with the number of person months remaining
that you would need to work
in order to meet your effort commitments
without a prior approval request needed,
and so then that would allow you to then calculate
what percent effort would be remaining
for that award period.
So you can do it both ways.
And then if someone has an academic
versus a 12-month appointment,
it's the same basic idea.
You do the same thing, but in this case,
you are going to have to make sure
that you look at the periods in question
to make sure that you're not crossing over
between an academic and a summer period.
So for example, in this example,
if this was a nine-month faculty,
and that seven-month period
that has already occurred was the entirety,
you know, basically was like,
whatever, October to May,
that is all within a faculty's academic period.
However, if it crosses over
between the academic versus summer,
you need to make sure that you were doing the calculations
for sort of both of their efforts
if they are split out as separate in PeopleSoft
or if the percent effort is separate.
So you just sort of have to be wary
of the start and end dates of the periods in question
that you're looking at.
But that's, you know,
these effort reduction calculations.
So Dawn, feel free to move on after that,
unless anyone has a question on it.
[Dawn] No, I didn't see anything in the chat,
so there's not.
All right, I mentioned earlier
about looking at proposal information
or commitments on proposals in UVMClick,
and so I will show the navigation,
just some screen prints of the navigation in a second,
but generally, it's here.
So you go to Grants,
click on Reports, Custom Reports,
and then in the search filter
enter Investigators on Proposals,
and you'll get these four proposals
or reporting options.
I generally suggest these bottom two,
but all of these are available for you.
So, I mean, you can look at,
and then once you get them you can filter
to just put in by your faculty member's last name
and that'll bring up, you know...
Here, I can go to this.
So your Grants, go to Reports, Customer Reports.
It'll bring up
and then you put in Investigators on Proposals,
it'll bring these up.
Then you can put in the last name.
This defaults to something else,
I think maybe proposal number,
so you just change it to PI last name
and you can put that information here,
and you're really just focusing on,
again, in this one I did the PI only,
so do that one first.
Put their name, search,
and you're really only focusing on pending sponsor review.
So you're gonna come up with everything,
whether it's awarded or unfunded.
I don't know all the other options,
but I think it'd probably just be those three, right?
Pending, awarded, or unfunded.
You'd click on the funding proposal number
and kind of scroll down past this flowchart,
and you'd click on the working budget name.
That will open up a new screen,
and under the left-hand menu you'd pick View Budgets.
The next left-hand side menu,
you click Personnel Costs
and then you'd get to all the personnel pages.
And here it already is going to be in percentages.
You're not gonna have the person months.
So this is really what you would expect to see
once it gets into the PI Portal
it were to be awarded and set up.
So I tend to just do this, again, for those two reports
and look at everything pending for the faculty member.
I would suggest putting a comment
in the individual's documentation
so that you can have a conversation.
You know, put the proposal number,
the proposal period, the commitment, and their role.
And then as you proceed throughout the fiscal year,
go back to this, run it again
and see if there's anything new,
but if you still just see the same pending proposals,
you know this commitment amount isn't changing,
the role isn't changing,
the time period isn't changing,
but you could just have the conversation.
"All right, have you heard anything on any of these?
Are any of these unfunded?"
You could put a note here just saying,
"Unfunded, contact your SPA RA to get that moved
from pending sponsor approval to unfunded."
Or you could put another note here saying,
"This one has been awarded.
We don't have the award document.
We need to request our advanced account.
Because the start date has already passed,
we need to get this set up and moving."
So those would be my recommendations for this,
and really, after you're done with the proposal piece,
you'd wanna really document everything.
So this is a good example of a note to enter.
So, "Quarterly review was done.
We reviewed all commitments and actual effort
and there were no effort corrections needed
for the last quarter or the upcoming quarter for him,"
the PI or your faculty member.
Second note, "We need to initiate a no-cost extension
for project 12345."
Third comment was, "Reviewed personnel effort
on his projects and graduate student Jane Smith
is not distributed on project 9754.
Notified the department administrator
via Notified button on such and such date."
So you're really looking at the individual's effort,
listing your action items, noting any,
that you've done the review of the personnel effort
on their projects and any action items for that.
I will also mention, you can use this Comments feature
for other things.
So if you have,
like, really effort-related,
you know, do they have a startup package
and they have a grad student on that,
and you say, they say,
"All right, well, once my startup package is spent out,
this grad student will be applying their effort
to grant 123456.
Keep an eye on that budget to know
when to move this grad student."
So anything that would help you
or the PI or your faculty member
in administering not only their award
but any awards or effort,
their effort and any effort of anyone they oversee,
is a fair game to put in here.
I mean, obviously auditors can see what we put,
so here, don't put something that's gonna get us in trouble,
but anything that's useful for you
to trigger those conversations for the next quarter,
or if you have multiple people helping faculty,
that they can see all that information there.
Pivoting back to proposals though,
like, some recommended discussion points
related to proposals are,
will my pending proposal affect my ability
to meet my commitments
on current active sponsored agreements?
Should it be awarded?
So having those conversations
and getting ahead of the game of what you might need
to be prepared to get sponsor approval
on other awards.
Should I communicate effort commitment changes
to the sponsor to proactively address reductions
of effort and/or disengagements longer than three months?
Kind of (chuckles) related to the comment
I just talked about.
Should I request an advance account
if anything has been awarded by the sponsor
but not received yet?
And have the sponsors communicated
that any pending proposals will not be funded?
And again, reach out to your RA
if any of those should be updated
from pending proposal to unfunded.
So again, you prepare,
you look at the individual's effort,
you look at the personnel on their projects,
and make sure their effort is accurate, complete,
and identify your action items
and document that,
and you just keep going through each quarter.
Rhonda said, "Can you delete a message once it's put in?"
Yes, you can.
So I can go back, oh, I don't have it displayed,
but there's, where you had the + button to add a comment,
there's a negative button and you can just delete it there,
but save it. (chuckles)
I think if you delete but don't save it,
it will still be there.
All right, did anybody else have any other questions?
I will read through the comments
to see if I can address anything that,
or add any more context to anything.
If any other questions come up
throughout your reviews or over time,
feel free to reach out to me.
If you guys have any feedback on what you're seeing
in both pieces, you know,
I guess the PI Portal and the sponsored project commitments
that could help improve your ability to do these reviews,
let us know and we can see what we can do
of getting different information in there
or additional information.
So Angela had a question.
"I have a question that might be easier..."
All right, we can, (laughs)
-did you wanna ask it now or? -[Angela] Yeah.
[Dawn] Yeah, okay, go for it.
[Angela] So it applies to PIs
who are normally below 1.0 FTE,
and you may not be able to answer this,
but I was wondering how the system works
when they get a new appointment letter
where their FTE changes.
Is it best to wait for that FTE to change in job data
before updating their distribution,
or is it okay to update their distribution
and wait for that to change?
I just don't know
-how the system- -[Dawn] I wonder if Katrina
would have any different...
I would think you'd want to have
the job data updated first
and then get the distribution in there,
and it's all the same employee record.
Is that accurate?
[Angela] Yes.
[Dawn] Yeah.
There's no policy on it. I'll put it this way.
So like, either way we can do it, it's defendable
of what happens during the transactional process.
I mean...
[Angela] I think my concern is,
[Dawn] Yeah.
[Angela] if I enter the distribution into the system,
is it going to calculate that on the old FTE
if it's not updated in job data,
which would then hit the grant disproportionately?
[Dawn] Yeah, it will.
But, like, either way is just, it's defendable,
and I think it would be best, personally,
to wait till it's updated
and then wait till the job data is updated
and then do the distribution.
But if it doesn't happen that way,
we're not gonna be in trouble as an institution,
because it's still, there isn't a policy around it.
It's all gonna be done timely (chuckles) in theory, right?
So I wouldn't, like, stress about it,
but my recommendation is to let job data get done first
and then do the distribution.
[Angela] I think my concern is if it's,
will it go back and correct the grant then
if it hit disproportionately-
[Dawn] It will.
[Angela] (indistinct) It will?
[Dawn] Yeah.
So Katrina's very good at making sure
what was the individual paid during the previous payrolls,
what should they have been paid,
and getting that updated accordingly.
So her and I work very closely on things like that
to make sure it all looks correct
and it's charged accurately.
[Angela] Okay, thank you.
[Dawn] Yeah, so either way you do it,
it will get charged correctly.
There's random scenarios that stuff happens,
but her and I,
we communicate on them to make sure we get things corrected
and that it looks correct,
but so, either way you do it,
it should be correct, (chuckles) is what I wanna say.
[Angela] I'm finding with many of my people,
if I wait for job data it will no longer be timely.
[Dawn] That's true.
But your Cost Transfer form,
that's a, what's the word?
I don't know why this word is escaping me.
It's a...
[Participant] Extenuating circumstance.
[Dawn] Thank you! (laughs)
Like, I say this every day. (laughs)
Thank you, yeah,
so that is a very reasonable extenuating circumstance
of why it's late and that would just get approved.
It's out of your control.
[Angela] Thank you. That helps.
[Dawn] No problem. All right.
[Josh] Yeah, I can answer Anne-Marie's question.
I was typing out an answer
and I realized I can just say it.
[Dawn] Okay. (chuckles)
[Josh] So Anne-Marie's asking,
"If we propose 10% effort for six months in the proposal,
the sponsor awards three months,
so long as it's, in this case, it's a fixed one
with no effort commitment in the award,
basically, are we supposed to adjust the effort
so that it's 10% for the three months,
or it's 10% worth of what would be 10% worth of effort
for six months into three months?"
Now, the answer for something this specific situation,
where we have no effort commitment
that we made to the sponsor
and there's no effort commitment included in the award
and it's fixed price,
is I would do whatever the PI wants to do in this case,
because there is no effort commitment here.
It would probably make the most sense
from an ease standpoint
of just putting in 10% for three months,
and then if the PI needs more time
or needs more effort,
then they can add it, especially because it's fixed.
That's what I would do in this case,
but it's sort of up to what the PI wants,
if there's no commitments that we made in the proposal
that we sent to the sponsor and in the award document.
So that's what I would do.
-[Dawn] Yeah, I agree. -[Josh] And obviously
there needs to be minimum effort,
because it still follows UVM effort policy,
but in this case, just beyond that,
ask the PI what they wanna do.
[Dawn] Yeah, and the important piece there
is going back to what does the award document say,
or what was proposed to the sponsor?
And so if there's no commitment, the faculty feels,
"All right, well, it's now only three months,
so I have to get everything done in three months,"
what do they feel they to do for that?
-And- -[Josh] Yeah,
and what I say for best practices too, for a fixed,
especially if we know something's gonna be fixed,
is don't send,
basically, we don't send them any budget,
we don't send them any effort information,
and it's pretty clear
that what we put in the funding proposal budget
is just illustrative.
It's sort of illustrative of what we think is needed
to get the work done,
but it doesn't represent a real commitment to anyone.
Yeah, I mean, even if it ended up, like, being 30%,
they're not gonna give us the money for that.
It still needs to get done.
Like, fixed prices are a little different
and tricky in that way.
But I also, I meant to mention
that I do still plan to get the presentation
from Part 1 up on our website as well.
I'll probably submit both of these presentations,
'cause Part 1 was really about, you know,
how does a commitment get proposed to the sponsor
and what are the ramifications on the way it gets proposed?
So I think if anybody here wasn't part
of that Part 1 training and would like to see that,
maybe just put your name in the chat
and I can let you know when it's available,
or just know that it'll be coming in a couple weeks.
Up here on the screen I do have some other supports,
central support available.
So you have, like I said,
our Effort Management Reporting website.
There's some overviews, policy,
effort verification user guides.
There's some FAQs,
and then you can always reach out to our office,
and actually, I should have put SPA up here as well,
'cause some things, like definitely the sponsor approval
and any other questions,
you guys know to go to them already.
And I think that's...
Oh, maybe (mutters indistinctly).
Oh, so, yeah, I mean, it's kinda open lab time,
if you guys wanted to poke around in there,
if you haven't already been doing so.
I'll finally put my camera on so you can see,
for those of you who don't know me
or haven't worked with me yet.
Many of you I have been working with
almost for, like, 15 years now at this point,
but some of you guys, I haven't worked with you yet.
So I am Dawn, and thank you, guys,
for attending our training today.
Hopefully it was helpful.
But yeah, reach out with any questions.