The following are a few best practices for managing effort reports for your unit:

• Meet and communicate frequently with your principal investigator (PI)/faculty to review and discuss costing allocations, new awards, awards for which effort will be reduced and salary modifications.
• Reconcile your accounts monthly. To reduce the greater-than-90-day cost transfers, stay ahead of the 90-day allowance to process costing changes.
• When waiting for an account to be set up, create an advance account in the interim to ensure effort is captured and reported.
• Generate the Effort Certification Summary Report on a frequent basis to effectively manage your portfolio of effort reports. Follow up with the respective certifiers for all effort reports “in process” to avoid delinquency.
• Effort reports containing grants managed by different ECPs will route to each ECP simultaneously. Before taking action, the ECPs should discuss what, if any, changes need to be made to the report and which ECP will take action on behalf of them both.

Payroll Accounting Adjustments (PAAs)

Effort Certification Reports include all payroll accounting adjustments (PAAs) approved and submitted for the applicable certification period, before the effort report is generated. 

If a PAA is not included in the effort report, the ECP must process costed changes directly in the effort report before it is certified. As a result of the costed change, a salary reallocation will initiate a PAA “within” the certification process. Once the effort report has been certified, the PAA process will begin with the department CCMs. The PAA follows the same routing that it would if initiated outside of the certification process. Failure to update will result in a recertification of effort.

The ECP also must add details of the PAA in the comments field (i.e., applicable pay period, percentage effort) and attach supporting documentation when applicable.

Cost Shared Effort

Any costing allocation that includes FD120 and a grant worktag is captured on the effort report, and represents cost shared effort.

If a costing allocation includes FD120 and no grant worktag, the cost shared effort will not be captured on the University’s effort reports, and it must be manually reflected on the effort report.

Any cost sharing from funding sources other than FD120 (e.g., FD400, FD600) is not captured on the effort reports, and it must be manually reflected on the effort report.

When costing FD120, the default Expense Purpose Code is 1000 Instruction. You must change it back to a Sponsored Project Expense Purpose Code (i.e., 1210, 1230, 1080, 1060).

Faculty Effort on Sponsored Funding During Sabbatical Period

If a faculty member is contributing committed effort on a sponsored award during their sabbatical, the sabbatical pay costing allocations must include FD120 and the grant worktag and Expense Purpose Code associated with the grant in order to be captured in the Sponsored Activities section of the effort report.

If FD120 and/or the grant worktag is not included on the costing allocation, the ECP needs to manually reflect the cost shared effort on the effort report.

If a faculty member’s only source of funding is sabbatical pay, and FD120 and the grant worktag are not included on the costing allocation, no effort report will be generated. In these cases, the ECP must contact the effort certification administrator (ECA) to generate an effort report.

Faculty with Sponsored Funding that Spread Pay over 12 Months

Faculty with nine- or 10-month appointments can spread their pay over 12 months; however, they cannot allocate exempt academic year (AY) pay during July and August in advance of contributing effort to a sponsored award. Doing so represents charging salaries, fringe benefits and related indirect costs in advance of work being performed in the academic year, which is not allowed by Brown’s sponsoring agencies.

Due to system limitations, the percentages on the effort report are required to total 100%.

There is no “effort attributable to the pay allocations that represent the spread of academic year salary”; therefore, the percentages noted do not represent effort and this needs to be noted in the comments field.

Salary Cap

Faculty salary that exceeds a sponsored imposed salary cap requires an adjustment to the effort report. The ECP must select Salary Cap as the change reason code and adjust the effort percentage to reflect actual effort. The certified effort should be consistent with the approved costing allocation included on the Salary Cap Worksheet.

Multiple Changes to Effort/Multiple Change Reasons

Workday effort reporting does not allow for multiple change reason codes (i.e., only one change reason code can be selected). In cases in which there are multiple reasons related to a change of effort percentage, the ECP must modify the certified effort percentage field to reflect actual effort. In the comments field, the ECP must explain the details associated with each of the each of the change reasons.

For all PAA changes, the ECP must include the details of the PAA in the comment field. The details must include the amounts being moved, grants impacted and resulting effort percentages. This level of detail is needed so that the ECA can reconcile the PAAs to the respective effort report. Attach all applicable supporting documentation.

Terminated Worker Effort Reports

Effort reports for terminated workers are routed to the ECA. The ECA will provide the ECP with instructions and a completed Terminated Worker Effort Report template detailing the terminated worker’s effort for the respective period. The ECP will review and make changes, if needed. The PI or another person with firsthand supervisory knowledge of the work performed by the worker will certify the template.

Providing Additional Supporting Documentation to the Certifier

In many cases, the ECP may want to include supporting documentation to provide additional information to the certifier. To attach supporting documentation:

• After retrieving and opening the effort report, select Change Effort.
• Attach supporting documentation via the attach feature (select the paper clip icon).
• Include comments explaining the document that was attached.

The certifier will be able to open the attachments when reviewing/certifying their effort report.