Source: OSP Website

Regular and ongoing account reconciliation throughout the life an award helps to ensure expenditures are within budget and in compliance with award terms. Department/Local Level Managing Units are primarily responsible for reconciling accounts and working with the PI to determine allowability and allocability of expenditures on sponsored awards. The timely review of expenditures helps with:

• Identifying and correcting unallowable expenses
• Mitigating the need for cost transfers
• Managing budget to actuals
• Assessing the burn rate of an award
• Avoiding over-expenditures
• Avoiding large balances at the end of an award
• Ensuring expenditures on the general ledger are allowable, allocable, reasonable, and able to be invoiced or reported to the sponsor

Timely account reconciliation helps to facilitate the disabling of sponsored chart of accounts in the general ledger and the segment closeout of awards in GMAS processed by OSP Research Finance. To assist with the closeout process, OSP Research Finance distributes a monthly HART Report to Departments/Local Level Managing Units to proactively identify awards ending in 30, 60, and 90 days (30-60-90 Report). Please contact an OSP Financial Analyst or Manager to be added to the monthly distribution list. Department/Local Level Managing Units can generate a similar report using the HART Segments dashboard.

The financial activity of an award should be monitored from the day the account is active and until it is terminated. HART (Harvard Analytics and Reporting Tool) is Harvard’s web-based tool for generating financial and sponsored management reports. The Transaction Listing Report, Period Transactions, Sponsored Invalid Code Combinations along with eCRT certifications are four of the reports that form the foundation for conducting an effective review.