It is a best practice for school districts and charter schools to implement centralized control processes involving cross-functional teams to review grant-related expenditure reports, especially reports for cash drawdowns. In no instance, should the district’s grants management office submit expenditure reports in isolation without sufficient review and verification by business office staff (in addition to other administrative offices, including budget, human resources and payroll).
A collaborative process is essential to ensure adequate review and verification processes are applied by staff working in various administrative offices outside of the district’s grants management office. Specialized review and verification processes requiring a cross-functional team include:
- Adjusting journal entries
- Allowable versus nonallowable cost allocations for certain invoiced costs involving select vendors
- Allocations of costs benefiting multiple grants or cost objectives
- Analysis of various original source documents supporting eligible expenditures
- Time and effort accounting calculations and allocations
- Accrued wages and benefits records
- Split-funded staff payroll and benefit records
- Prepaid expenses recorded in certain months
- Refunds, rebates, program income or other reductions to expenditures
- Projections supporting the need to apply for an amendment to a grant application
A cross-functional team will provide essential skill sets supporting analytics of complex datasets and review of multi-faceted compliance topics that require access to multiple information systems and collections of records. Districts lacking sufficient communications across various program and administrative offices are informally referred to as “silo” organizations that are frequently associated with various kinds of avoidable compliance issues and sometimes large refunds to grantor agencies. It takes a team to work smart.