Effort Certification

Overview

Effort Certification documents are created via batch for a defined reporting period for employees funded by or cost-shared on a sponsored agreement. Refer to How Records are selected for more information on how labor entries are pulled to create the effort documents. 

Effort Certification documents route as follows:

• Project Director and Fiscal Officer
• Optionally to Organization Review and Object Code Review.
• If changes are made, the document will route to Contracts & Grants Processor.
• If Workstudy object codes are used, it will route to Workstudy Review. 
• If the document is a Recreated Effort Certifcation document, it will route to Contracts & Grants Manager. 

Documents route for approval and may be modified to correct the distribution of effort. After being fully approved, if any changes were made, a Salary Expense Transfer is automatically created to align the Labor Ledger and General Ledger with the newly certified effort. The fully-approved effort certification document serves as a permanent record detailing the distribution of effort for an employee for a given period.

Report Definition

The Report Definition maintenance document defines for which period and salary types Effort Certification documents will be created. 

Report Definition

• University Fiscal Year and Report Number: Identify the Report Definition for which effort certification documents will be created. The Fiscal Year and Report Number are used by:
  • the effort certification batches to determine for which salary types and time period effort certification documents should be created. 
  • the Effort Certification Recreate process to determine for a specific employee and time period effort certification documents should be recreated
  • the Outstanding Effort Certification Reports to manage Effort Certification documents during an effort reporting cycle. 
• Report Period Title: Description of the Report Definition, for example, 2022 Summer Session. 
• Report Period Status Code: The status of this Report Definition. Values are N, O and C. The description of the status codes can be changed using the Report Period Status Code lookup and maintenance document.
  • When new Report Definitions are created, either manually or by the Fiscal Year Maker, the status is N (new)
  • When you're ready to create effort certifications or need to recreate effort certifications, change the status to O (open)
  • When the effort certification cycle is complete, change the status to C (closed)
• Report Begin Fiscal Year and Period Code: The fiscal year and period associated with the beginning period for which effort is to be reported. 
• Report End Fiscal Year and Period Code: The fiscal year and period associated with the ending period for which effort is to be reported. 
• Report Type Code: This value defines the pay frequency for a group of employees and helps to further define for which employees this report definition should generate effort certification documents. Report Type Code is an attribute of Pay Earn Group. 
• Expense Transfer Fiscal Year and Fiscal Period Code: When modifications are made to an effort certification document, this value defines the fiscal year and period to which the generated salary expense transfers should post. 
• Report Return Date: The date on which effort certification documents for this definition should be completed. There is no functionality around this field and can be left blank. 

Report Position Object Group Codes

This section defines the position object code groups to be included in this report definition. Labor Ledger entries associated with object codes that belong to these object code groups will be considered (along with other report definition values) when effort certification documents are generated.

Labor position object code groups are defined using the maintenance document of the same name (a part of the Kuali Financials Labor Distribution module). The Labor Object Code maintenance document (also part of Labor Distribution) assigns each labor object code at your institution to a particular labor position object code group. Examples of groups might include CL (Non-Exempt Staff), HO (Hourly Staff), and WS (Work Study).

Parameters

The following parameters are used by the EffortCertificationExtractJob and effortCertificationCreateJob batch jobs to configure the Effort Certification module. 

Use the following parameters to configure what records to include/exclude:

• ACCOUNT_TYPES: Identifies account types that should be excluded, for example, Work study accounts. 
• FEDERAL_ACCOUNT_IND: Set to Y, to include employees paid on accounts/awards with Federal or Federal Pass Through. The award associated with the account the employee is paid on is where Federal or Federal Pass Through is identified. 
• SUB_FUNDS: Identifies sub funds that will be processed by the EffortCertificationExtractJob. Leaving the parameter blank will select all available sub-funds.

Use the following parameters to configure routing: 

• FEDERAL_ROUTE_IND: When set to Y, Effort Certification documents will only route to project directors associated with federal accounts. 
• WORKSTUDY_ROUTE_OBJECT_CODES: Object codes in this parameter will trigger Workstudy Review. 

Use the following parameters to configure for report definition to extract and create effort certification documents.

• EXTRACT_FISCAL_YEAR: The fiscal year to extract and create effort certification documents. 
• EXTRACT_REPORT_NUMBER: The report definition to extract and create effort certification documents. 
• RUN_IND: Indicates if the EffortCertificationExtractJob should run. If set to Y, this step will run. If set to N, the step will not run, even if the EffortCertificationExtractJob runs. This allows you to schedule the EffortCertificationExtractJob batch job to run at a regular time daily, but to only extract reports on days when you have updated this parameter to Y.

Batch Jobs

The Effort Certification module uses two batch jobs to extract and create effort certification documents. 

• EffortCertificationExtractJob: is run first and extracts records that will be used to create the Effort Certification documents. When this job runs it creates an output report and populates a table that can be used to view the detailed records extracted:
  • Effort Certification Extract Build - accessed via the Dashboard

  • Effort Certification Extract Process - accessed via the Batch File lookup, reports/ec directory. 

• EffortCertificationCreateJob: Run this job to create the Effort Certification Documents that will route for review and approval. 

Effort Certification Extract Build

Details the records extracted. This table is cleared when any of the EC batch jobs are run. 

Effort Certification Extract Process

Provides statistical information about the records extracted and lists any errors that might need resolution. Correct any errors and rerun this job until you are ready to create the actual documents. 

Errors include: 

• Payroll Amount is Less than or Equal to Zero.
• The employee must be paid on an account funded by federal grants.
• Labor object code not found.
• Higher Ed function code not found.
• Fund group not found.
• Account number not found.

Effort Certification Documents

Report Information

This tab identifies the employee whose effort is detailed in this effort certification document. It also specifies the time periods this effort certification document pertains to and provides an identifying report number.

Effort Summary

The Effort Summary tab displays for Fiscal Officers and Project Directors and lists the accounts to which effort is currently distributed for this employee. It also includes an Add section to allow the addition of new accounting lines, and it displays grand totals for all the sections.

Current effort distribution accounting lines are organized into two sections:

• Federal and Federal Pass Through Accounts:
  • Federal accounts are determined by checking the agency of the most recent award (if any) associated with this account. Each agency has an associated agency type code attribute. If the agency's associated agency type code is identified as federal by parameter FEDERAL_AGENCY_TYPE, then all accounts associated with awards from that agency will be considered federal for the purposes of effort certification.

  • Federal pass through accounts are determined by checking the most recent award associated with an account (if any). If the federal pass through indicator flag on the award is Y, then the account is considered federal pass through for the purposes of effort certification.

• Other Sponsored and Non-Sponsored Accounts. If the account is not identified as federal or federal pass through, it will be listed in this section. 

Changes to existing effort distributions can be made in these sections by changing either the effort percentage or the salary and clicking the recalculate button.

Special routing has been added to this document to ensure that project directors and fiscal officers are notified of changes made by other users that involve their accounts.

Any modification to the effort, whether through modifying existing lines or adding new ones, requires the user making the change to add a note to the document explaining the reason for the change in effort. 

When a change to effort is made, the system recalculates salary as (Effort/100)*Original Total Salary amount.

Modification of the salary line is not allowed unless the effort for that line has been modified. Due to the rounding inherent in modifying effort by percentage, occasionally you may be required to manually adjust a salary amount slightly in order to match the original salary grand total. To modify the salary amount, enter the new value.

Note that total salary cannot change by more than .009 (rounding) and you can change the salary amount of a given line only by up to half a percent of the total amount (.005*Original Amount).

Effort Detail

The Effort Detail tab is intended for use by fiscal officers and Contracts and Grants staff members. It contains all the information found in the Effort Summary tab and additional fields related to fringe benefits (F-Ben).

Outstanding Effort Certification lookups 

The following lookups can be used to manage the effort certification process. 

Outstanding Certifications By Report

This lookup shows the number of Outstanding Certifications for each Report Definition (Fiscal Year and Report Number). 

Outstanding Certifications by Chart/Org/Report

This lookup lists outstanding certifications by various search criteria for a particular fiscal year. 

Effort Certification Recreate

The Effort Certification Recreate (ECD) document allows an authorized user to manually extract data from the Labor Ledger for a single employee and recreate an effort report for a specified fiscal year and reporting period. This function is used only on an exception basis after the batch process has generated reports for a specific report period. 

How Records are selected

Employees

• If FEDERAL_ACCOUNT_IND = Y, then only employees paid on accounts associated with Federal or Federal Pass Through awards are selected, if set to N, then employees paid on any Contract & Grant accounts are selected. 
  • Federal Accounts are defined as those associated wiith Awards assigned an Award Type defined in parameter FEDERAL_AGENCY_TYPE. 
  • Federal Pass Through Accounts are defined as those associated with Awards where the Federal Pass Through box is checked. 

After the above parameter is evaluated - the following parameters are evaluated: 

• • If ACCOUNT_TYPES is populated, employees paid on accounts with account types in this parameter will be excluded. 
  • If SUB_FUNDS is populated, only employees paid on accounts with the specified sub funds will be selected. If this parameter is empty all eligible sub-funds will be selected. 

Records

The Report Type Code and the Position Object Group Codes on the Report Definition determine which records will be selected. Salary transaction lines that meet both of the following are selected. 

• Report Type Code is an attribute of Report Earn Paygroup. The Earn Code and Pay Group are fields on the salary transactions in the Labor Ledger. 
• Position Object Group Code is an attribute of Labor Object Code. The Labor Object Code is used on salary transactions in the Labor Ledger. 

Report Type Code

Report Definition

Report Earn Paygroup

Labor Ledger Transaction

Position Object Group Code

Report Definition

Labor Position Object Group Code

Labor Ledger Object Code

Labor Ledger Transaction