Over the last year or so, PeopleSoft has added new functionality to help with grants, contracts, and project costing. Joe Willever, PeopleSoft ESA Product Strategy, recently provided an overview of new PeopleSoft Grants and Contracts functionality that is now available.
Manage Proposals More Efficiently from the WorkCenter
Beginning with grants, you can now manage proposals more efficiently from the WorkCenter. You can take certain actions like submitting proposals, generating awards, and generating pre-awards en masse. This provides greater efficiency throughout the proposal process.
View Changes on the Award
Additionally, you can now view changes on the award in many fields including institution, subdivision, department, and contact. You’ll also be able to see the history associated with the project.
Observe More Consistent Use of Effective Dating in F&A Processing
For SFA transactions, the Accounting Date is brought forward from the source ACT cost transaction or from Exception Date if noted. There’s not much change for retroactive F&A—you can set the specific date or system date. The larger change is in the way revenue offsets are created. Going forward, you create these offsets using the accounting date on the source cost transaction. This way, when changes are made after the fact, the revenue offsets can be created much more consistently than in the past.
Link Attachments to a Specific Attribute on the Award
In Image 30, there is new attachment functionality. You can now link attachments to a specific attribute like a particular milestone, funding period, certification, modification, or general. There is also search capability to locate the attachment quickly.
Contract Rate Visibility on the Award
Customers recently requested a quicker way to identify rate sets associated with the award, so now you can select Contract Rates to see the rate set, description, and a link to the specific rate set. Overall, within just a few clicks you can see the criteria for each rate set.
Proposal Approvals Moving to AWE and Fluid Approvals
Customers also requested the migration of proposal approval workflows. Now, across Financials, you can access approvals for grant proposals where you are used to seeing assets, payment requests, suppliers, etc.
Previously Delivered Enhancements
A few of the previously delivered enhancements include:
- Grants Fluid Homepage – 5 New Actionable Pivot Grids
- Extending End Dates Across Contracts, Grants, and PC
- LOC Import Utility with Exception Reporting
- Project Hierarchy
- PC – Simplified Analytics
- Project Request and Program Budget Approvals to Fluid
Prioritize Tasks Using the New Grants Homepage
The goal of the New Grants Homepage was to provide notifications that something was coming due. You can now easily monitor:
- Milestones Due
- Certifications Expiring
- Expiring Letter of Credit Funding
- Aged Pre-Award Spending
- Awards Expiring
- Award Teams
Extend End Dates Across Modules
The End Date field is commonly used in contracts, grants, and projects. We created a new component called Modify End Dates that allows you to quickly update the End Date across all these applications and data fields. You can improve accuracy and consistency by updating everything from one single page.
Import Letter of Credit Funding into Contracts
You now have new functionality to manage letter of credit funding information in three main areas:
- Import Sponsor Funding File: This works with ACM and DHHS file formats and requires minimal effort to implement.
- Review and Reconcile: You have the ability to review the Letter of Credit Doc ID discrepancies and exceptions reports.
- Update Contracts: You can now assign a Letter of Credit Doc IDs to contract lines from your imported file.
Update Invalid Billing Plans
A new actionable exception report on WorkCenter helps you update billing information for your billing specialist, bill to address, billing authority, and billing inquiry phone or place your plan on hold. Additionally, you can now activate multiple contracts in a single action.
Hold Billing and Revenue on Unpaid Cost
You’re now able to hold billing on unpaid costs. This is configurable, can also hold revenue, and uses with rate-based lines. AP and expense transactions are validated for payment at run time, and the entire voucher must be paid before transactions can be billed. For expenses, partial payments are not possible.
Assign Transactions to Assets
For anyone using the Assign Transactions page, the UI has been improved for visibility and usability. There are more identifiers in the grid to help you properly identify which rows to be included on your asset.
Expanded Search
New search functions including component keyword search, credit to cash search, and powerful capabilities using elastic make searching much easier for users. You can search categories by applications including projects, grants, contracts, customers, billing, and journals.