CHAPTER 6.HOW to HANDLE a CONTINUATION YEAR on a GRANT
OLD ACCOUNT NUMBER and NO NEW MONEY. Sometimes one can extend the final year of a grant without additional funding. Just carry on with the current grant year as usual, but change the ending date on your reports and graphs to be the new ending date for the grant, otherwise the reports and graphs won't include your latest data.
NEW ACCOUNT NUMBER and NO MONEY CARRIED FORWARD. This is the simplest case for a new grant year. Therefore, load a new grant file (see GETTING STARTED, Chapter 2), and proceed to ENTER DATA.
NEW MONEY and CARRY FORWARD MONEY FROM LAST YEAR. The ability to carry forward unused monies or deficits from one grant year to the next is a big benefit to researchers, but it is a problem for accountants, because there are many ways of handling this problem. How you handle this problem with Grant Tracker depends on how your institution handles the problem. The suggestions listed below should give you enough ideas so that you can solve almost any problem that your institution's accounting office throws at you.
(1) NEW ACCOUNT NUMBER. How to Calculate the Carry-Forward From Year 1 to Year 2. Reconcile the expenditure statement from your institution for the last month of Year 1 with your records in Grant Tracker. (a) If there are no outstanding orders for Year 1, then add any balances (or subtract if any balances are negative) to the appropriate category of the Award Statement for Year 2 (i.e., if the carry-forward is positive, then enter it as a Deposit, if the carry-forward is negative, then enter it as a Payment.). (b) If there are outstanding orders for Year 1, search for all of the Open orders (search for O under check Number), then set their costs to zero in Grant Tracker, delete the "O" under Number, and type on the Memo line "Transfer to Year 2". Now obtain the new balances for the different expense categories from your recalculated Net Worth report for Year 1 of your grant, and add them to the Award Statement figures for Year 2 (or subtract if negative), i.e., if the carry-forward is positive, then enter it as a Deposit, if the carry-forward is negative, then enter it as a Payment. Now enter the expense items into Year 2 that you just "zeroed out" of Year 1. The balances for Year 2 should now be correct.
(2) KEEP THE SAME OLD ACCOUNT NUMBER. How to Reconcile the Accounts for Year 2. If your institution starts with a zero Expense-To-Date and readjusts the Award Statement as described above (i.e., carries forward the excess or deficit funds to the new Award Statement), then reconciling can be handled in the usual manner. However, if your institution just combines the expenses for Year 1 with the expenses for Year 2, it will cause you more work. One way of calculating the current balances is to take the values for the balances from the expenditure statement for the last month of Year 1, and subtract these values from the values for the different categories of expense for the current month of Year 2, and compare these values with the values in the Grant Tracker Net Worth report (see REPORTS). Certainly this must seem confusing at first, but if you just spend a few minutes thinking about it, you will soon come up with the best solution to this problem at your institution.
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