CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTIONOne of the more important but least interesting duties of the Principal Investigator of a grant is keeping track of the budget, but finding that your grant account is overdrawn can be catastrophic. The Expenditure Statements from an Institution are issued several weeks (months?) after the end of a given month, but Principal Investigators need up-to-the-minute information on the status of their grants, especially as the end of the grant period approaches. They need Grant Tracker. Grant Tracker is a simple, common-sense bookkeeping program that allows Principal Investigators to keep TRACK of the financial status of their grants, with up-to-the-minute displays of Funds Awarded, Expense-To-Date, Commitments, Balances, and Personnel. The manual teaches how to set up the accounts and how to reconcile the accounts with the expenditure statement from your institution. Grant Tracker is designed so that a secretary, without any formal training in accounting, can easily manage the accounts of a grant, however, Grant Tracker is equally useful for a Central Administrator who manages many grants for many Principal Investigators. The first version of Grant Tracker was released in 1986. Version 5.2 was released in 1996, and was available for WIN, DOS, and MAC. In 1998, we developed a new version of Grant Tracker. One important feature of the new version of Grant Tracker was that the accounts, categories, and subcategories that are preprogrammed can be modified or deleted, and new accounts, categories and subcategories can be added. This gives the user complete flexibility, and makes Grant Tracker adaptable for any type of grant. The current version of Grant Tracker, GRANT TRACKER® 2000, works with Quicken 2000 (Intuit Inc.), a popular bookkeeping program. GRANT TRACKER® 2000 has four parts: (1.) Sample Data Files: A customized file that runs under Quicken 2000, that contains data for a sample grant so that a new user can see how grant accounts are set up, and can try out the different features and report formats that are available in Quicken 2000. (2.) Blank Data Files: An empty customized file for the user to enter data for his/her own grant. Additional files can be installed for multiple grants. (3.) Manual: An extensive manual is provided to explain how to set up the accounts for a grant using these customized files, how to reconcile the accounts with an institutional expenditure statement, how to carry forward balances from one grant year to the next, etc., etc. (4.) Quicken 2000 by Intuit (or you can use any later version of Quicken).
GRANT TRACKER® 2000 will get your grant budgets under control! |