As a best practice, everyone responsible for sponsored research expenditures should bereviewing their reports on a regular basisutilizing the Business Warehouse reports.
Use the BU Comptroller’s Resources for After-the-Fact Review, including guidelines and templates.
Do you recognize all of the individuals who were paid? Is anyone missing?
Are the salary charges correct?
Are your subrecipients invoicing?
Do you have an appropriate burn rate? i.e. spending too fast or too slow?
Is the budget amount correct?
Are there any expenses you do not recognize?
If you had foreign travel on your federal award, are you compliant with the Fly America Act?
Did any expense on your award require sponsor prior approval? Did you retain said approvals?
Were all expenses for goods and services received during the period of performance?
Do you have a NIH annual progress report due within the next quarter? Do you have more than 25% of the current year budget unspent?
Are expenses reasonable, allowable, and allocable?
Where and how do I move an unallowable cost?
Running Reports
Business Warehouse How To
Viewing Budgets in the Business Warehouse (BW) can be achieved through several different reports. The most commonly used reports for Departments are the Principal Investigator reports located under the Reporting Tab, Grant Management (Faculty) reports.
One other frequently used report is the Budget vs Actual Report (login required) located in the Grants Management (Distributed) folder. This report is mainly used by Central Offices and Departmental Administrators.
All reports show data that is one day old so if you are running a report today, the data that is shown is through yesterday.
None of the Business Warehouse reports currently encumber salary, fringe, or indirect charges. Please see your department administrator with any questions.
Training
IS&T offers several training classes around Business Warehouse Reports. See their training link here.
My Grant Expenses How To
My Grant Expenses is a reporting tool that has been developed specifically for Principal Investigators to provide a consolidated, easy-to-access view of budget and expenditure data for grants in his or her portfolio.
Sponsored Programs Post Award Approval Transactions
Sponsored research activity consists of expenses charged to BU Grants in SAP that begin with 50 (Federal) or 55 (Non-Federal). The following table summarizes those transactions that require approval by Research Accounting.
Capital Equipment
Approval Required
Salary Adjustments / Cost Transfers *
Approval Required
Subrecipient Invoices
Approval Required
Journal Entry – Cost Transfers (Transaction Code “ZK” or “ZV”) Journal Entry – Original Charges not via ISR (Transaction Code ZJ)
Approval Required (except when the adjustment is between two IO on the same SAP grant or when the adjustment is to correct a GL within the same IO)
Internal Service Requisitions – Original Charges (i.e., Service Center Billings)
No Approval Required
Non-retroactive First-time Pay to any Funding Source
No Approval Required
All Other Invoices
No Approval Required
*For the purposes of this policy, Salary Adjustments / Cost Transfers include any retroactive revisions to salary and wage distributions and are requested in the “Personnel Actions” under the “Manager Self Service” tab in the SAP Business Warehouse.
Valid/Invalid Internal Orders for Cost Recovery Journal Entries
The Valid/Invalid Internal Orders for Cost Recovery Journal Entries report (download) provides a listing of valid/invalid internal order numbers related to grants and contracts to BU in order to assist with the preparation and approval of cost recovery journal entries. This report is specific to internal orders that begin with 950xxxxxxx or 955xxxxxxx only. Please copy/paste the internal order(s) into the space provided and enter the month end date of when expenses occurred and you will be advised whether or not the internal order is appropriate for the expense recovery.
Please note that while this workbook is accurate to date, status is subject to change based on day-to-day grant activity. This report is updated on a monthly basis by Sponsored Programs Post Award. If you have any questions or if you would like to be notified monthly when the report is published, please contact SP Post Award at rasetup@bu.edu.
Treatment of Unallowable Costs Charged to a Sponsored Project
Unallowable costs, erroneously charged to an award, must be promptly transferred to your Departmental University Cost Center, Discretionary Account, or other non-sponsored project account. Departments should work with their Sponsored Programs – Post Award Research Administrator if they have any questions on how to resolve. Find your SP-Post Award RA.
Upon monitoring all of your expenditures, if an error is discovered, please refer to the Cost Transfer Policy.
Per the Office of Management and Budget Uniform Guidance, the salaries of administrative and clerical staff should normally be treated as indirect (F&A) costs and should not be direct charged to sponsored projects. However, under certain conditions, the Guidance does provide criteria where the direct charging of administrative and clerical costs may occur. This guidance document is designed to aid faculty and staff in determining whether it is appropriate to budget for and charge such costs on a specific sponsored project.
Criteria for including administrative and clerical salaries in the proposal budget
Are the administrative/clerical services integral to a project or activity? Does the project require services that are beyond the routine level normally provided by administrative unit personnel, or by personnel in comparable units?
Can the individuals involved be specifically identified with the project or activity and is their effort commitment on average at least 20% (approximately one day per week) during the budget year?
If the answer to each of these questions is yes, then it is acceptable to include the related costs in the proposal budget. Please include the following template statement in the budget justification, tailoring it as necessary to apply to your project:
“This project includes extensive management of [subawards / travel / investigator coordination, etc.] This volume of activity and the tight timeline of the project mandate more extensive monitoring than the services routinely provided by the department. A XX% time administrative / program assistant is needed to oversee the following activities . We are therefore requesting agency approval for a [List % time appointment here] [List position title here] as an administrative cost allowed under 2 CFR 200.413.”
For further assistance with proposal budgeting, please contact your Sponsored Programs Research Administrator.
Charging Administrative and Clerical Salaries Under Uniform Guidance
Awards issued after December 26, 2014 are subject to the Uniform Guidance. Per the criteria above, if you receive an award in which these proposed costs were specifically included, they may be charged directly to the award. If such costs have not been included in the proposal and award budget, you will need to obtain prior written approval from the awarding agency in order to direct charge them to the project.
This is only guidance regarding the allowability of directly charging administrative support to an award; it is the Principal Investigator’s responsibility to work with his/her Department Chair or Director regarding the necessary non‐sponsored financial support of the administrative personnel.
The Uniform Guidance requires institutions to ensure that costs that are direct charged in this nature not be recovered as indirect costs. As part of the development of the Facilities & Administrative rate proposal, Sponsored Programs Post Award will ensure these costs are excluded to ensure compliance with the Uniform Guidance.
The following are examples of circumstances under which it may be appropriate to directly charge sponsored projects for administrative costs:
Large, complex programs that entail assembling and managing teams of investigators from a number of institutions.
Programs that involve extensive data accumulation, analysis and entry, surveying, tabulation, cataloging, searching literature, and reporting.
Programs that require travel and meeting arrangements for large numbers of participants, such as conferences and seminars.
Programs with a principal focus of preparing and producing manuals and large reports, books and monographs (excluding routine progress and technical reports).
Programs that are geographically inaccessible to normal departmental administrative services, such as seagoing research vessels, radio astronomy projects, and other research field sites that are remote from the campus.
For concerns related to Proposal/Budget Preparation and Submission please contact Sponsored Programs at 617‐353‐4365. For concerns related to Charging Administrative/Clerical Salaries please contact Sponsored Programs Post Award at 617‐353‐4555
Trainee Expenses
Predocs and postdocs are a valuable resource at Boston University; these individuals work with a plethora of departments so this section was designed to be a department administrator’s one-stop shop to help in all trainee needs.
Definitions
Postdoctoral Trainee: A person with their PhD appointed on a training grant (T32 / F Series / R25). This person receives a monthly stipend for cost of living. There is no employee / employer relationship.
Postdoctoral Fellow: A person with their PhD hired as a staff member at Boston University. This person receives a monthly salary. There is an employee / employer relationship.
Pre-Doctoral Trainee: A person working toward their terminal degree appointed on a training grant (T32 / F Series / R25). This person receives a monthly stipend for cost of living. There is no employee / employer relationship.
BU Undergraduate Student: A person working toward their terminal degree who works on a non-training grant (R01, R21, etc). This person is paid weekly via GRA student payroll.
BU Graduate Student: A person working toward their terminal degree who works on a non-training grant (R01, R21, etc). This person is paid weekly via GRA student payroll.
Payroll, Stipend, Benefits & Tuition
Please review the Trainee Expenses Table which summarizes the different populations of trainees at BU and how Payroll, Stipends, Benefits, and Tuition is addressed based on the type of Sponsored Research Awards they are paid from.
Hiring
Pre-doctoral students (predocs) are Boston University students and must follow University and State Laws accordingly. Predocs can be paid via non-service stipend or service stipend. See Student Employment office for details.
Student Employment Office: Click on “On-Campus Supervisors” or “Off-Campus Employers” to get started
Postdoctoral scholars (postdocs) are not Boston University students and are paid either by stipend via Accounts Payable or paycheck via payroll. It is important that Departments are clear with Post-Docs about the implications of moving from a BU paid employee to a BU paid stipend and vice versa as it significantly affects their fringe benefits.
Payroll: Postdocs who are BU employees must be hired through Human Resources.
Stipends: Postdocs who are paid via stipend should request the form and guidelines via email at apupload@bu.edu
Benefits for Non-Employee Postdocs
Boston University offers benefits to non-employee postdocs including subsidized MBTA passes, health insurance, and dental discounts. Information on these benefits can be found here.
Federal guidance dictates how Boston University employees are compensated from Sponsored Research. Overbase payments are a form of additional compensation for work that is preapproved by their Manager (Staff) or Dean (Faculty) and is not part of an employee’s regular position.
The Sponsored Programs Post Award team has created a Salary Tool to help you decipher the appropriate amount to charge to Sponsored Research accounts for those individuals who earn more than the DHHS Cap. Within this tool are four tabs so it is important to ensure you are using the correct tab based on the employee status. You should only fill in the yellow boxes; the rest of the sheet will fill in automatically based on formulas. If you have any questions around this sheet, please reach out to your Sponsored Programs Post Award RA.
Rebudgeting may be required throughout the life of the project. In some cases, re-budgeting will have to be approved by the sponsor. In some cases, departments want to re-budget their award in order to align budget with expenditures. This is not a requirement by the sponsor, however, it is something that departments can work with their Sponsored Programs research administrator to achieve. Listed below are common examples of when a sponsor requires such a re-budget:
Change of Scope
If the Principal Investigator changes the scope of the award, a rebudget to achieve the new goal may be necessary. The change in scope and the budget request must be submitted through the Sponsored Programs research administrator for sponsor approval.
Most common changes of scopes:
PI is leaving the project for 90 days or more
PI is changing their effort by greater than 25%
A subcontract is being added that was not in the initial budget
If your award restricts the use of equipment or is specific to the piece of equipment you can purchase and you need to make a change, this requires Sponsor approval and must be submitted through the Sponsored Programs research administrator. If the equipment is over the capitalization threshold and was not originally budgeted, regardless of whether or not sponsor has to approve, some schools require the re-budget to be approved by their Dean as the re-budget will have a negative impact on the facilities and administrative cost return to the school. For questions about Equipment, please contact your Sponsored Programs RA and Property Management.
Upon monitoring all of your expenditures, if an error is discovered, please refer to the cost transfer policy.
A grant cost transfer is an after-the-fact reallocation of a direct expense, either salary or non-salary, to or from a sponsored project. Learn about how to comply with BU’s policies around these processes.