At present there is no standard report equivalent to the Financial Summary Report which provides an overview of grant expenditure by department so obtaining an overview of grants expenditure and remaining budget on active awards can be more difficult. COGNOS reports for monitoring grant expenditure at departmental level are currently being developed however, and ROO's Information Services team is now producing monthly and quarterly reports at School level, namely:
- Active awards
- Expenditure YTD
- X5 application in current financial year
Underlying/departmental level details are available to Finance Managers and can be forwarded to departments on request to assist with reviewing the department's portfolio of research grants and contracts.
Furthermore, with the development of reporting via Cognos, Finance Managers/Advisers can run one-off bespoke reports from the Grants module.
Reports that are currently available to departments from UFS include:
GMS: Award Status Report (individual grant): this includes details of the total budget, commitments/expenditure project-to-date and budget remaining. This report, however, is not currently available for an individual project where the award is held in another department (please note that it is possible to select any starting period when running this report i.e. the report will not give a year to date picture unless the starting period is AUG-XX, where XX signifies the year.
GMS: Award Status Report (for department): As above but provides information on all the active grants held in a department with the proviso above. As the report is in hard copy and cannot be readily exported to Excel, and it may run to hundreds of pages for a large Science department, this is not an easy report to use in its current form.
GMS: Actual Expenditure Enquiry: Provides a breakdown of actual expenditure (including purchase order commitments) and whether any has failed funds checking.
GMS: Departmental Overhead Analysis: Can be particularly helpful when trying to clarify what departmental overheads have been earned by which grants.
AUD: Cost Audit Report: Can be particularly helpful when trying to clarify what costs have been transferred from a grant to the general ledger.
Various UFS screens show budget details and expenditure against budget at the level of individual grants. The expenditure enquiry screen shows details of transactions on an individual grant level and this information can be exported into Excel.