Funded work, and the cost of administering it.

“The grant is fully funded. The department is still short.”

Grant-funded organizations carry an administrative burden that is real and largely unmeasured. The question is not whether compliance is necessary — it is — but what it costs per award, and whether that cost is recovered.

indirect cost recovery
effort reporting
F&A
award closeout
recharge
cost share
sponsored programs

Your words, not ours.

Where it concentrates here

Five places the money tends to go in education and research. Each one is concentrated — a single agreement, a single queue, a single account nobody reviews — which is why sampling walks straight past them.

Indirect cost negotiated at one rate and recovered at a materially lower one, with the shortfall absorbed centrally and never reported.
Effort reporting maintained to satisfy an auditor rather than to reflect where time actually goes, so the allocation basis is unusable for management.
Review and approval queues — IRB, IACUC, export control, contracts — adding weeks between award and first spend.
Core facilities and shared resources recharging below cost, subsidized from a budget nobody has reconciled to the subsidy.
Awards closing with unspent balances returned, alongside other awards overspending.

Not every education and research is the same business

Research-intensive universities and academic medical centersF&A negotiated with a cognizant agency and recovered at whatever each sponsor's cap allows, with the shortfall absorbed centrally and rarely stated.
Independent research institutesNo tuition to cross-subsidize, so every point of unrecovered indirect is felt in the same year it is incurred.
Teaching-led collegesNet tuition per enrolled student after institutional aid, with program-level contribution almost never assembled.
Core facilities and shared instrumentationRecharge rates that must break even across the year, set from a utilization assumption and revisited only when the deficit is noticed.
Clinical trials officesIndustry-sponsored budgets built from a coverage analysis that assumed an enrollment pace the site did not achieve, with per-patient costs fixed anyway.
Continuing and professional educationSelf-supporting units charged an overhead rate the institution set rather than one it costed.

Where this data actually lives

Banner, Colleague or Jenzabar as the student and finance system; Workday Student where a replacement is part-way through
Kuali Research, Cayuse or InfoEd for proposals and pre-award — with the post-award record frequently living somewhere else entirely
iLab or Stratocore for core facility recharge, or a workbook that is the real rate calculation
An effort certification module completed after the period it certifies, which is what makes it a reconstruction rather than a record
eRA Commons, Research.gov and Grants.gov holding the sponsor's version of the award, which is the version that governs
Subrecipient invoices arriving as PDFs and re-keyed into the award ledger

Named because it changes what the intake asks for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them rather than surprised by them.

Reported in your numbers, not ours

indirect cost recovery against the negotiated rate
cost share committed vs met
award closeout cycle time
effort certified vs charged
recharge center surplus or deficit
proposal-to-award conversion
research expenditure per investigator
net tuition revenue
discount rate

The obligations that set the deadlines

The Uniform Guidance single audit, and whether last year's findings actually closed
The negotiated indirect cost rate agreement, and the rate proposal and base year behind it
Effort certification records — the evidence for every salary dollar charged to an award
Subrecipient risk assessment and monitoring documentation, which the pass-through entity owns whether or not it performed it
Financial conflict of interest disclosures, and research security and foreign support disclosure on the investigator side
Export control determinations where research involves controlled technology or foreign nationals
Title IV program review exposure and Clery reporting where student aid is in scope

What the review would ask you for

6 requests written for education and research and asked of nobody else — 2 of them core. They sit alongside the operating spine every business has — finance, revenue, receivables, payables, contracts, people, IT, operations, risk, commercial and governance — which is 107 further requests.

Grant and award portfolio Core With sponsor, period, and indirect rate.
Effort reporting and cost allocation Core How salary is split across awards.
Indirect cost recovery Negotiated rate versus actually recovered.
Research compliance overhead IRB, IACUC, export control review — time from submission to approval.
Core facility and shared resource economics Recharge rates and subsidy.
Enrollment, retention and yield If teaching is in scope.

Anything you do not have can be skipped in one click, with a reason. The intake is completed in the client portal, which saves each answer as it is given and can be returned to as often as you like.

When this stops being interesting and becomes urgent

A single audit finding, particularly a repeat one
An indirect rate renegotiation, which needs a base year nobody prepared for
A sponsor disallowance, or a closeout that will not reconcile
A large award ending while the staff, space and instrumentation it carried remain
A finance or research administration system replacement, which surfaces every local workaround at once
A school or department running a structural deficit that central budget has quietly covered for several years

Who this involves

Signs it: The CFO or vice president for finance; the vice president for research on anything touching awards
Resists it: Deans and department chairs, whose unit economics become visible centrally
Has been asking for it: Sponsored programs administration, who have been carrying the exceptions by hand

Who commissions it

CFOs, research administrators and deans. Phase one is priced before phase two is discussed, the report is yours either way, and we take no vendor commissions or referral fees on anything we recommend.

See the proposal and the price Talk it through first

The proposal sets out the sequence week by week, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your number of operating units. No call required to see the number.

Closest to this

Operations that share more with education and research than the sector label suggests.