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WHITE PAPERSponsored by

Simplifying Time &

Effort Reporting for

Grant-Sponsored

Activities

Today’s Innovations in Education

Research Grants

Failure to Keep Accurate Documentation Can Be Costly

How an Automated Workforce Solution Can Help

HSU Grants Management Staff Save More Than60 Hours Per Month with an Automated Solution

The Bottom Line

www.kronos.com

Simplifying Time & Effort Reporting for Grant-Sponsored Activities

www.kronos.com

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Colleges and universities need external funding sources to meet their goals. But accepting funding

from outside sources means that institutions must be accountable to show proper stewardship of

grant awards. For research universities, this creates significant pressure to provide accurate reporting

of labor costs and hours to sponsoring agencies.

This can be especially challenging within campus-based environments, where students and faculty often

have more than one role. Students might hold multiple jobs, each with a different manager, and faculty

might be working on multiple research projects at the same time — each with its own unique funding source.

Tracking down the required approvals, keeping careful records of the hours worked for each

employee and project, and providing the necessary documentation can tax even the most well-

organized payroll, financial aid, and grants management staff. However, an automated workforce

management solution can help.

In this white paper, we’ll examine the requirements for reporting time and effort for grant-sponsored

activities. We’ll look at the main challenges that stand in the way of doing this effectively, and the

implications if colleges and universities should fail to do so. Finally, we’ll explore how an automated

workforce solution can make this process much simpler and less susceptible to costly errors that

could jeopardize future grant funding.

Simplifying Time & Effort Reportingfor Grant-Sponsored ActivitiesHow an automated workforce management solution can make this process easier and less prone to error

Simplifying Time & Effort Reporting for Grant-Sponsored Activities

www.kronos.com

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Research Grants

In 2018, U.S. colleges and universities received $51 billion in research grants and contracts from the

federal government, USAspending.gov reports.1 This figure doesn’t include the billions of dollars they

also received in state, corporate, and private foundation grants.

With the acceptance of a grant comes the responsibility of spending it appropriately and reporting

back on every dollar spent. Being a responsible steward of grant money involves proving to the

funder that the money is being used only as intended — and this process includes documenting how

much is spent on labor costs and for what purpose.

Most grant-funded projects have some type of labor costs associated with them. Colleges and

universities are accountable for keeping track of the hours that employees work on grant-funded

projects and reporting this information back to the funder. Depending on the award, salaries can

account for 60 percent to 75 percent of the direct costs of a grant project.2

Any employee or graduate student who spends some of their time working on a federally funded

project must be included in a federal time and effort report. But other funders also require a record

showing the labor expenses associated with their grants.

If colleges and universities receive at least $750,000 in federal funding in a given year, they are

subject to a procedure called a Single Audit, meaning they must have an independent auditor come

in and administer both a financial and a compliance audit.

“Auditors are looking to see whether you’re charging the funding agency only for allowable expenses

that were approved as part of the original review process,” says Kacie Flynn, executive director of the

Humboldt State University (HSU) Sponsored Programs Foundation. “They want to see that you have a

system in place that proves employees were working on the grant project to which you’ve charged

their hours, and not on another project instead.”

She adds: “You need to have assurance that, whatever system you use to record employees’ time,

you can provide that documentation in the event of an audit.”

Colleges and universities are accountable for keeping track of the

hours that employees work on grant-funded projects and reporting

this information back to the funder.

1 USAspending.gov, “Federal Investment in Higher Education.” Retrieved from https://datalab.usaspending.gov/colleges-and-universities.html.

2 National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), “Colleges and Universities Express ConcernsOver Time and Effort Reporting.” Federal Auditing News and Insights, May 2014. Retrieved from https://www.nacubo.org/-/media/Nacubo/Documents/products/FANIIssue3.ashx.

Failure to Keep Accurate Documentation Can Be Costly

If colleges and universities can’t provide adequate documentation to satisfy a funder’s requirements,

the funder can disallow the expense. “They could say, ‘You couldn’t prove this cost should be

charged to the grant that we gave you, so we’re not going to reimburse you for this cost.’ That’s

probably the most common consequence,” Flynn says.

A funding agency also could impose fines or even cancel the grant or contract if an audit uncovers

serious violations. For instance, this might occur if a college or university fails to put a system in place

for accurately tracking the time and effort spent on grant-funded projects — or if time and effort are

significantly overstated.

Even minor violations can jeopardize an institution’s chances of receiving future grant awards from a

funding agency, especially if they occur with any frequency. “You don’t want to be in a position where

you have audit findings and you’re considered a high-risk grant recipient,” Flynn observes. “There are

larger ramifications if you have multiple findings.”

In recent years, several large universities have incurred hefty penalties and/or agreed to substantial

settlements as a result of time and effort reporting violations.3 For example:

• A prestigious mid-Atlantic university paid a

$2.6 million settlement to the U.S.

Department of Justice for overstating time

and effort spent on grants received from the

National Institutes of Health.

• A private mid-west institution paid a $5.5

million settlement for failing to comply with

effort reporting standards and for

misrepresenting time spent on NIH grants.

• An audit at a large public university on the West Coast uncovered errors in the reporting of

shared effort costs in cooperative agreements with other agencies. The university was unable

to support its claims of certain salary costs and did not adequately document the percentage

of time that staff spent on grant-funded projects.

• An audit at an Ivy League institution revealed weaknesses in the university’s effort reporting

system. Business managers were certifying labor effort reports, although they were not in a

position to know whether the work was performed — and effort reports were not certified in a

timely manner as specified by university policy.

Simplifying Time & Effort Reporting for Grant-Sponsored Activities

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3 Texas Tech University, “Partial List of Recent Audits with Effort Reporting Findings.” Retrieved from https://www.depts.ttu.edu/accountingservices/ORA/documents/as-ora-audit-summaries.pdf.

Simplifying Time & Effort Reporting for Grant-Sponsored Activities

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How an Automated Workforce Solution Can Help

With a paper-based timekeeping system or even just an ERP solution, campus administrators don’t

have easy visibility into the hours that students, faculty, and other employees have worked on various

grant projects, especially if they’re involved in multiple projects.

“An electronic workforce management solution such as Kronos for Higher Education provides key

insights and automated workflows that a manual timekeeping system or an ERP solution alone can’t

provide,” says Jennifer Perkins, higher-education industry consultant for Kronos and former executive

with the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education. “This simplifies time and effort reporting and

reduces the chances of making a mistake.”

For example, administrators can set certain rules within the system, such as the maximum number of

hours that students can work each week — and managers can receive automated alerts when these

thresholds are about to be exceeded. An automated solution also makes it easy for employees to

specify which grant projects their time should be attributed to, and it makes reporting and certification

much simpler as well.

When a college or university receives a grant, a grants administrator adds a new job code for that

grant project and indicates which employees are authorized to work on it. As researchers work on a

grant-funded project, they keep track of their hours by clocking in and out in the mobile app. If a

researcher is working on multiple grant projects, he or she would see a drop-down list of job codes

within the app and would choose the appropriate project to which those hours should be assigned.

Through a special geo-fencing feature, campus administrators can set up a designated perimeter for

each job or grant project, so that students and faculty would have to be within that perimeter in order

to punch in. This cuts down on the likelihood of fraud in reporting time and effort.

All the hours that a student or employee works are kept on a single electronic timesheet — even if

they have multiple jobs or work on multiple grant projects. What’s more, the software’s workflow

engine automatically asks supervisors and principal investigators to sign off on the hours worked

within their department or on their grant project, and supervisors and PIs can approve these hours

remotely from any Internet-connected device.

“An electronic workforce management solution such as Kronos for

Higher Education provides key insights and automated workflows

that a manual timekeeping system or an ERP solution alone can’t

provide, This simplifies time and effort reporting and reduces the

chances of making a mistake.”

Simplifying Time & Effort Reporting for Grant-Sponsored Activities

www.kronos.com

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HSU Grants Management Staff Save More Than 60 Hours Per Month with an Automated Solution

The HSU Sponsored Programs Foundation administers grants and contracts for Humboldt State

University, which is part of the California State University system. Although HSU is relatively small, with a

total enrollment of fewer than 8,000 students, the foundation submits about 250 grant proposals every

year and currently manages a portfolio of 566 grant projects valued at more than $87 million.

“We’re a pretty high-volume operation for the size of our institution,” Flynn says.

HSU receives grants from federal and state agencies, as well as private and corporate foundations.

“All of those funders have some sort of requirement for tracking and reporting on the time and effort

charged to grant projects,” she notes.

For many years, the university used paper-based timesheets to document this information. “Paper-

based timesheets work, but they require a lot of effort,” Flynn says. “Getting the required signatures

on each piece of paper, certifying the time that students spent on the project, and getting it to an

office space by a 5 p.m. deadline — all of those things produce a tremendous margin of error.”

In particular, charging employees’ time to multiple grant projects was quite a chore.

“It’s very common for us to have one employee who works on grants A, B, and C,” she explains. “At

the end of each two-week pay period, they were submitting three different paper timesheets that

showed their hours spent on projects A, B, and C. Those timesheets all had to be certified and signed

by the proper PI, and then we were scanning them into the correct project folder so that when funder

B said, ‘Show me the backup documentation,’ I could produce the timesheets on just that project. But

this was a very cumbersome process. It was cumbersome for the employee, who had to maintain

three different pieces of paper, and it was cumbersome for us in having to scan and file and retrieve

multiple slices of their time.”

Geographic hurdles made this process even more challenging. “Humboldt is at the very northern tip

of the state, only an hour from the Oregon border. We’re a very rural, remote community, and some of

the research we do is in the redwood forests,” Flynn says. “We had students out in the field, perhaps

working in a tree, who needed to turn in their timesheet. They would have to climb down the tree,

drive to campus, sign a piece of paper, and then go back out into the field. That’s really impractical.”

In 2019, the foundation began using Kronos to track the time and effort spent on grant-funded projects.

“Kronos gives students and faculty the flexibility to submit their time from wherever they are, which is

wonderful,” she notes. “And instead of having three separate paper timesheets, now employees have a

drop-down menu that shows projects A, B, and C. They can allocate hours appropriately in one place,

and their supervisors can sign off electronically. Collecting and submitting data is so much easier.”

Simplifying Time & Effort Reporting for Grant-Sponsored Activities

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Not only is it much easier for students and employees to document the time they’re spending on

grant-related activities — but grants management and payroll staff have recovered invaluable time

they can now spend on other activities.

“Before Kronos, we had five staff members who worked a total of 55 hours to do payroll every two

weeks,” Flynn says. “We also had six grants managers working a total of 33 hours every two weeks to

scan, file, and index all of the timesheets. We’re still trying to quantify what those numbers are now,

but I can tell you that we only use two employees for payroll now, and it takes them a lot less time.

And our grants management staff has gone from spending 33 hours every two weeks to zero,

because nobody has to scan and file paper-based timesheets — the information is available

automatically within Kronos when employees log their hours.”

The Bottom Line

Colleges and universities must keep careful

records of the time that students and employees

spend on grant-funded activities. Failure to do so

can prove costly, with institutions putting their grant

funding at risk if they don’t have an air-tight system

for documenting this activity.

The fact that many students and employees work in multiple jobs, and for multiple grant projects,

makes tracking their time and effort even more challenging. However, an automated workforce

management system greatly simplifies this process and reduces the chances of error.

“Kronos for Higher Education provides an easy way for employees to track time, especially when

they have multiple jobs,” Perkins says. “Combine that with a powerful workflow engine, and both

employees and managers save time and ensure a clear auditable trail of hours and payments.”

“With a smart timekeeping system like Kronos, it’s much easier for employees to submit their time and

for principal investigators to review and approve it,” Flynn concludes. “Nobody has to physically walk

a piece of paper to campus in order to get paid. Everyone gets paid on time and efficiently, and

grants management staff no longer have to juggle multiple pieces of paper. Instead, they now have

the capacity to focus on other responsibilities.”

“With a smart timekeeping

system like Kronos, it’s much

easier for employees to

submit their time and for

principal investigators to

review and approve it.”

Simplifying Time & Effort Reporting for Grant-Sponsored Activities

www.kronos.com

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This white paper was produced by eCampus News, the leading online platform that delivers

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About Kronos

Kronos is the global leader in delivering workforce management solutions in the cloud. Tens of

thousands of organizations in more than 100 countries—including more than 600 educational

institutions—use Kronos to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce

productivity.

Learn more about Kronos’ education-specific time and attendance, scheduling, absence

management, HR and payroll, hiring, and labor analytics applications at www.kronos.com/highered.

Kronos: Workforce Innovation That Works™.

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info@kronos.com

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