The award set-up process involves the establishment of the sponsored award (and associated grant lines) in Workday. Once the award and grant lines have been set up, the PI may begin charging to that award. The award set-up process at Georgia Tech involves several different parties and offices. The general steps are as follows:

  1. Sponsors send the Notice of Award (NOA) to the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP).
  2. OSP negotiates the terms/conditions and gets signed contracts.
  3. OSP requests detailed budget information from the department, and once received, enters this information into the Contract Information System (CIS).
  4. Grants & Contracts Accounting (G&C) runs a daily report to see what award initiations and modifications have been entered into the system. New award IDs are automatically generated when they flow from CIS to Workday.
  5. The G&C analyst will then enter the required information and create the prime grant worktag in Workday.
  6. The Intranet Contracting Officers Log (ICOL) notice is sent from OSP to the PIs, which represents the formal beginning of the award/grant in Workday. Note also that ICOL notifications are automatically sent by the system on behalf of OSP contracting officers when a proposal is accepted in eRouting, when a proposal status is changed to “pending” (it has been submitted to the sponsor), when a proposal has been withdrawn, or when an award/modification has been processed.

As with any process, issues may arise. Common ones along with proposed solutions are listed below:

  1. The sponsor does not send the NOA to the right contact people at Georgia Tech. (Solution: PIs should work with their financial staffs to ensure that administrators have seen the NOA).
  2. Contract negotiations may take a while. (Solution: Reach out to your OSP contact if it has taken more than a week).
  3. Issue: OSP needs budget information (and potentially other documents as well) before entering into CIS (Solution: Follow-up with OSP to see if they need anything from the department).
  4. G&C takes time to set-up the award in Workday (Solution: our goal is 2 business days, but if it extends beyond that, please reach out to your G&C Financial Analyst contact (found via the Grants & Contracts website: Grants and Contracts Accounting | Grants and Contracts Accounting)). G&C may be missing pertinent information required for set up, such as billing information. Also, sometimes integration errors occur stopping an award or a modification from flowing correctly into Workday.
  5. Not all grant lines are set up upon initiation such as internal collaborations, subawards and participant support. Please have your grant manager or financial administrator request these through the Workday request framework using “Request New Award Line/Grant.” 

Note that if spending must occur prior to the official award set up, an advance account should be set up through OSP. Please refer to the following PI Article to learn more about Advance Project Numbers PI Article – Advance Project Numbers (APN) | Grants and Contracts Accounting 

Thank you to Faith Taylor and Sam Guzak for their contributions to this article! If you have any questions, please contact Josh Rosenberg at josh.rosenberg@business.gatech.edu.