Use of a PCard (aka Purchasing or Procurement card) for non-recurring, small dollar transactions less than $3,000 in lieu of more traditional purchasing methods allows for efficient, flexible spending. These advantages may come at a cost when it comes to expenditures on sponsored agreements if appropriate internal controls are not in place. While all PCard […]

CIRA is part of the Walter Scott Jr. College of Engineering at Colorado State University and is located on the Foothills Campus. Primarily a research facility, with relatively few faculty and students directly working at CIRA, education and outreach permeate everything that CIRA does, through active relationships with other academic units on campus and with […]

Once a month, we are featuring a unit profile to support intra-campus collaboration and outreach. Our first spotlight features the Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands, known at CSU as CEMML. The Center is a service, education, and research unit in the Warner College of Natural Resources. In December, OSP met with CEMML Director […]

No Cost Extension (NCE) Request Sponsored projects often benefit from an extension period when progress is delayed or additional scope remains, as the project end date approaches. In research administration, we commonly refer to this as a No-Cost Extension (NCE). NCEs are the most common “prior approval request” that award recipients can request and sponsors […]

Making sure that GRA salaries budgeted to sponsored projects are accurate for your unit and for any other units that your PI may be collaborating with and having a well-documented justification will make it much easier to answer any questions that may arise during award/contracting.  It will also help to alleviate unexpected post award issues […]

Most sponsored agreements specify a time period during which the sponsor expects the awardee to complete all award activities and incur and expend funds – known as the Period of Performance (POP). The overall award start and end dates indicate the POP, for example, a 5-year POP expressed as 10/01/2021 to 9/30/2026. Spending outside of […]

Wildcards are characters that represent one or more other characters and can be used to maximize search results. For example, the asterisk (*) may be used to specify any number of characters at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of one or more search words. The wildcard search recommendations shown below are […]

As CSU rises to the challenge of developing and submitting more complex proposals, proposal budgets also become more complex.  The system still allows only one budget version to be marked ‘include for submission’, but the process of getting to that version of the budget may require iterated or partial budget versions. There are also reasons […]

Principal Investigators (PIs) and personnel paid on grants should charge for actual effort contributed to a sponsored project when the work occurs. Sometimes work is conducted during the academic year and other times during the summer. The three scenarios below show how effort might be distributed during the academic year, summer, or both and the […]

Brief Synopsis is a required field in KR PD. Data in this field can help provide transparency on the types of research being conducted at CSU and is used for reporting purposes.  The information entered here should include project details that are not readily available from other data fields in KR (such as the Project […]