This is what we would actually do, in what order, and what it costs.
No discovery call is required to see the number.
What we would go looking for
These are patterns that recur in education and research, written as things to
look for. They are not findings from a named engagement.
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.
The sequence
Five weeks for one operating unit. More units run in parallel rather than in
series, so a group does not take five times as long.
Week 1
Intake and reconciliation6 requests written for education and research, alongside the 107 covering the operating spine. We tell you which findings the gaps will limit before any fieldwork starts.
Weeks 2–3
Full pass, not a sampleEvery grant in scope is read rather than sampled.
Week 4
Quantification and challengeEach finding sized, and put to whoever owns it before it is written down.
Week 5
Report and walkthroughThe written report, ranked by annual value and by how hard each finding is to act on.
2 core requests written for education and research, inside the full intake.
Anything you do not have can be skipped with a reason — skipping narrows what the
review can conclude, and we tell you where before the work starts rather than after.
Grant and award portfolio — With sponsor, period, and indirect rate.
Effort reporting and cost allocation — How salary is split across awards.
If any of this is already happening
The review is always worth doing and rarely urgent. It becomes urgent when
something else is happening — and if one of these is, the sequence above compresses
to fit it.
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 needs to be in the room
Signs it: The CFO or vice president for finance; the vice president for research on anything touching awards
Will resist it: Deans and department chairs, whose unit economics become visible centrally — worth telling them what the
review is for before they hear it from somewhere else.
Has been asking for it: Sponsored programs administration, who have been carrying the exceptions by hand
What it costs
Priced by operating unit — an entity, a location, or a business the accounts are
kept separately for. The second unit costs less than the first because by then the
intake is built, the chart of accounts is understood and the patterns are known.
Purchase order is the primary route — most
buyers this size raise a PO and pay against an invoice on terms. Card and bank
transfer exist for those who prefer them.