Category
Finance & Accounting
Submitted By
Joy Vidalon, Joy.vidalon@colorado.edu, Cost Accounting Principal
Project Team
Joy Vidalon, Joy.vidalon@colorado.edu, Cost Accounting Principal
Carl Sorenson, carl.sorenson@colorado.edu, Financial Report Developer
Project Description
Automate the manual process of generating the Department Administration Indirect Cost Recovery (DAICR) report. This process informs the departments the DAICR amount they will receive for the coming year’s budget. Previously, we used Excel to create more than 90 individual department reports and manually sent them out via email. We sent out preliminary reports in June, and again, the final report in August. Now we have eliminated this manual process, replacing it with CU-Data > Team content > CUBLD > Finance > DAICR.
The stakeholders, which are department administrators, research faculty, research assistants, principal Investigators, and department financial managers, all can interactively run the new report in CU-Data and can optionally download the results into Excel. They can conduct forecasting and examine to see which PI’s or projects have been doing well. The report is readily available any time and it is fast, consistent, and accurate.
Project Efficiency
Efficiency:
• The new CU-Data DAICR report reduces days of work performed in the central accounting office to zero.
• CCO and Budget Office offered virtual Open Office Hours. We listened to the needs and feedback from the campus stakeholders, and as a result, we fine-tuned our report with more features that helps the stakeholders, and the final product was thereby enhanced.
Innovation:
• The new report can be run at any time, rather than produced just once a year. It is readily available, fast, accurate, and consistent.
• Shared five-minute introductory video to run the new DAICR report:
• https://www.loom.com/share/7f226ed54f8f4463a5344eddcfbadd0e
Project Inspiration
We, at the Campus Controller’s Office (CCO), always strive to streamline processes when possible and if time allows. The DAICR report used to take over a week to complete manually, including calculating the split % and looking up re-org status. The extensive manual handling of data introduced a higher likelihood of human error at various stages of the steps. Therefore, CCO reached out to the expert report developer in the Budget Office. We collaborated, envisioning the better/improved service to the campus stakeholders. As we started this project, we discovered the tremendous improvements we could implement for the campus stakeholders.
What Makes You Happiest about this Project?
After rolled-out the DAICR report in the CU-Data in June 2023, the feedback from the stakeholder was overwhelmingly positive and deeply appreciative. They expressed genuine gratitude for the effort we put in. The CU-Data auto report allowing for comprehensive report to be generated effortlessly. They can drill down into every single project in their department, viewing the PI and CO-PI name, and reviewing award info, and downloading the report to Excel to conduct further analysis are all so helpful to them. It is most satisfying feeling to know there are happy customers around Boulder campus.
