• Internal financial reports
• Financial reporting to the sponsor

Internal financial reports

The day-to-day responsibility for the financial management of a specific grant lies with with PIs and their administrative staff.  To enable them to fulfill this responsibility, a series of daily, monthly, or budget period reports is available on the web.

A higher level of financial oversight of sponsored research should be conducted by deans, department heads, and directors.  To make this possible, different level electronic reports are available for potential high risk financial areas.  These oversight reports provide units and colleges information that may be used to identify patterns that should be explored further or to consider changes in operations to improve the outcomes. 

The financial reports web site is http://financial.reports.umn.edu.

PIs and administrative staff should use reports for reconciling (verifying that the transactions on the account are correct). Specific tasks include viewing both expense and revenue transactions that have hit the account each month and during the budget period.

PIs and administrative staff should use reports for monitoring (checking spending against the budget). Specific tasks include viewing current (to date) expense and balance information by the type of expense for one account, viewing current (to date) account balance and total costs since the project began, displaying expenses for a specified period of time (e.g., grant period), and reviewing budget period information by type of expense (e.g., equipment). It is also important to monitor how fast funds are being spent (burn rate) and the percentage of project time remaining and percentage of available funds remaining.

Deans, department heads, directors, principal investigators and departmental administrators also use reports for oversight. Specific issues to look for include salary transfers by PI or account, the spending rate of sponsored account in the department, accounts in pre-award status and the number of days from the start date, balances at project end date on fixed price accounts, non-salary expense transfers (IX documents) to sponsored accounts and non-salary expense transfers entered more than 45 days after the month in which the original transaction was processed, reportable and nonreportable program income amounts, sponsored accounts in deficit, Indirect Cost Recovery (ICR) that has been generated (not allocated) and the negotiated and effective Indirect Cost (IDC) rates, and the number and total amount for fixed price accounts in the department that have a remaining balance or a deficit.

Training Services offers classes on how to read financial reports and generate electronic financial reports. Contact Training Services at (612) 626-1373 for further information. Various security requirements must be met to access this data online; call the Financial Systems Support security office at (612) 624-8394 for more information.

Sponsored Financial Reporting (SFR) compiles and submits all required financial reports.
 
SFR sends a copy of the final report to the PI prior to release to the sponsor. PIs are given five working days to review the report and comment. If there are no comments regarding the accuracy of the report during that period, the report will be released.