It’s fair to continuously ask, “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 management of grants, well-managed budget, finance, human resources, payroll and student systems are essential to support the active management of the delivery of grant-funded services, programs and activities, not to mention management of many compliance-driven administrative activities. Grant program directors and managers need smart technology tools so they can focus less on compliance-related tasks, and more on performance and successful results.
It’s difficult to successfully shift your focus to performance-related details, if the collection and analysis of the many data elements that are required for active monitoring of nearly innumerable grant compliance-related details are primarily manual processes. This is where a collaboration tool can transform a cumbersome, time- and labor- intensive process by the grant management office(s) to aggregate numerous 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 effectively engaged in performance monitoring, in addition to having continuous insights into the functional status of systems connected to grant-related administrative 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 the 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
- Changes in scope or objectives
- 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
- Unexpended grant balances and eligible carryover amounts for 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 funding requests as simple and streamlined as practical to minimize administrative efforts to maintain compliance with numerous laws, rules and regulations and thereby minimize internal control risks.
To help school officials schedule the series of steps in their workflow to keep up with numerous administrative activities, TASBO publishes the TASBO Master Calendar containing deadlines and timelines for various processes you specifically need to be aware of throughout the year. The TASBO Master Calendar is accessible at http://www.tasbo.org/resource/tools-templates/master-calendar
The benefits of implementing collaborative tools have also been covered in connection with payroll reconciliation processes (see the article Internal Control Tip of Week – Payroll Reconciliations).