Quick Financial Review Tips:
Things to look for in your online financial reports
Overall Project Budget Management
Check your Budget Summary report:
- For a summary of your available funds;
- To compare your current budget to last month's ending budget balances to assess the reasonableness of the net change;
- To make sure your budget amounts are reasonable based on your expectations and knowledge of your research; and
- To determine if any re-budgeting between budget categories is necessary.
Check your Monthly Expenses and Cumulative Obligations (MECO) YTD report:
- To review trends in spending by month within a fiscal year.This can assist you with budget projections/preparations; and
- To identify any unexpected fluctuations in expenditures by month.
For Education Programs and Clinical Trials Customers
Check your Statement of Account report, which is available in a monthly version or a fiscal year-to-date version, only for HJF Education Program and Clinical Trials accounts#. Check it:
- To review all receipts and disbursements for a specific period of time;
- To review whether an expected receipt or disbursement has been posted to the account; and
- To check your current available balance.
Track Expenditures
Check your Fiscal YTD (Expense Detail) report:
- To make sure that all expenditures charged to your project are identifiable;
- To make sure that no duplicate charges are posted to your project;
- To look up the cost of past expenditures for goods or services;
- To look up final prices on your purchases, as some of them may differ from the original order (e.g., shipping costs added to final payment); and
- To look for any credit memos posted to your project. If you know you should be receiving a credit from a vendor, you should see a negative expense amount on this report.
Check your Open Purchase Order and Open Requisition Reports:
- To make sure that there are no orders in this report that have been completely fulfilled. If you believe that there is an order in this report that you have already received and paid for, please contact our Purchasing Department. You may be able to free up some available funds for your project.
Personnel and Payroll
Check your Payroll Detail reports:
- To make sure the appropriate employees are being charged to your project;
- To make sure that your employees are charging the appropriate number of hours to your project; and
- If you have employees that should be splitting their time between projects, verify that they are doing so.
If you have questions regarding information presented in the Payroll Detail report, please contact the Payroll Department.
Check Personnel Projections:
- To make sure you have adequate funds for personnel;
- To determine the effects of pay raises, bonuses and new positions on the project;
- To see how long funds will last if you have a date extension and/or additional funds; and
- To see the open positions still allocated to your project and determine their effect on the budget.