Last week’s article asked the question “Are technology systems working for the district’s employees?” OR “Are the district’s employees working for the district’s technology systems?” In the context of grant management, well-managed budget, finance, human resources, payroll and student systems are essential to support active management of grant-related roles and responsibilities. However, the collection of the many data elements that are required for active monitoring of nearly innumerable grant compliance- and performance-related details is a largely manual process in many districts. A collaboration tool will transform a cumbersome, time- and labor- intensive process by the grant management office(s) to a distributed team effort in sharing data elements from across budget, finance, human resources, payroll and student systems that do not talk to each other. Implementation of collaborative tools will also help cross-functional management teams be more engaged in grant compliance and performance monitoring, in addition to providing continuous insights into the functional levels of grant-related procedures, policies and process workflows, in addition to key controls.
Start with a risk assessment to identify which grants should be prioritized and take an inventory of the more difficult to organize data elements related to primary grant-related compliance, performance and reporting tasks, including:
- When to amend grant application(s)
- Authorized staff FTEs
- Authorized salary levels
- Budget-to-actual status and excess expenditures
- Preapproval required expenditure areas
- Locally authorized budget amendment levels
- Processing status for purchase orders
- Reconciliations of grant supported payroll
- Expenditure and performance reporting to grantor agencies
- Supplement not supplant
- Comparability
- Maintenance of effort
- Cash management
- Budget management
- Carryover funds
- Competitive procurement
- Contract approval and management
- Expenditures requiring advance approval by grantor agencies
In addition to using smart tools, an overarching recommendation is to “beware of what you ask for,” and keep grant-supported requests as simple and streamlined as practical to minimize internal control risk during the grant funding period.
A prior Internal Control Tip of Week article covered the application of collaborative tools to support and streamline payroll reconciliations (see the article Internal Control Tip of Week – Payroll Reconciliations).