Thank you so much for reading my blogs and for the interest these past weeks!  We have received some great questions as a result.  We thought we’d share the Q&A with everyone – hope this helps!  If you have other questions, please email the Help Desk at ITHelp@harvard.edu.  Your emails will go to the OBI project team.

Lets say you took a break from research admin for a bit and when you came back, CREW was gone and OBI is here.  What are the top reports you would tell a n00b to run?

The top grants dashboards I would recommend are:

• Historical Grants Financial dashboard - replaces CREW PER and allows you to choose dates from 7/199 through current month
• Invalid Code Combinations dashboard - newly updated so prompts and customizations work appropriately
•  Sponsored Accounts - gives information at the subactivity level, includes budget variances, and includes the Unreconciled Accounts page
• Subagreements dashboard - gives information at the subrecipient level, and provides drill through to the Vendor Invoice Detail and Subagreement details to see when invoices were paid and details on the year-logic account strings

If you need a refresher in how to run the grants dashboards, we do have 2 trainings scheduled in February.  You can register for them through the Harvard Training portal.

I took the training in the summer but am only becoming an active user now. This is in regards to formatting/layout. The examples show a nice report with all columns visible. When I run the report I get this little box where I have to scroll. What customization do I need to make to the report so that it can appear across the screen without a scroll and utilizes the free space next to it? I'm vaguely remembering a sort/pivot or subtotal that might have done it but can't seem to replicate it.

On the Period Transactions page of the Current and Historical Grants Financial dashboards, we have frozen the column titles at the request of the users.

The downside is that we lose real estate on either side so that users have to scroll both horizontally and vertically.  (We’re working on this with Oracle to find a solution.)  However, if you want to use the full width of the screen, you want to select a column (“as of Period” or “Fund” are good ones to use), right-click and select “Move Column to Sections.”  The downside is that the column titles are no longer frozen.

In the trainings, I always suggest a simple 3-step to get the Period Transactions page into a presentation that makes the results look similar to what people were used to with the CREW PER:

1. Click on the “Fund” column.  Right-click to select “Move Column to Sections.”  This groups the results by Fund and gives you a grand total for all of the columns.
2. Click on the “Root” column.  Right-click to select “Show Subtotal After Values.”  This allows you to have a subtotal for each subactivity.  (There’s a hidden column in this dashboard that makes us have to go one column to the right of where we want to subtotal.)
3. Click on the “Zeta Object” column.  Right-click to select “Move Column to Prompts.”  Choose “2 Expense” from the dropdown so that you are only looking at the expense object codes at one time.

Does OBI use the period (month/year) that is entered on the ADI Sponsored Budget uploads to make a determination on when data is pulled in to the OBI reports. Can you help us to understand where exactly the budget data is coming from?

My second blog post entitled OBI and Sponsored Budgets goes through this in depth.  Yes, OBI uses the period that is entered on the ADI Sponsored budgets to determine when they are effective and should be reflected on the Grants Financial dashboards.
There are a couple different budget fields in the OBI Grants Management dashboards.  Here is a quick overview:

• Current GL Sponsored Budget: the budget for the life of the subactivity through the night before.  This is similar to what you’d see in GMAS and on the CREW Period Expense Report.
• Project to Date GL Sponsored Budget: the budget for the life subactivity through the To period selected in the prompts.  This budget is what is used primarily on the Period Transactions page of the Current & Historical Grants Financial dashboards, and on the Printable Grants Financial dashboard.  The Grants Working Group decided that this should be the main budget used as it reflects what is truly happening during the period the dashboard is run for.

For several of our funds, the Printable Grants Financial budget in OBI does not match the budget listed in GMAS. We are trying to figure out how the two systems could differ on what the budget is.  The Sponsored Research Administrators in our department, about a month or two ago, went through all of our funds to make sure that GMAS has the correct budget.  We aren’t really sure why there is such a disconnect here. 

My second blog post entitled OBI and Sponsored Budgets goes through this in depth.  There are a couple different budget fields in the OBI Grants Management dashboards.  Here is a quick overview:

• Current GL Sponsored Budget: the budget for the life of the subactivity through the night before.  This is similar to what you’d see in GMAS and on the CREW Period Expense Report.
• Project to Date GL Sponsored Budget: the budget for the life subactivity through the To period selected in the prompts.  This budget is what is used primarily on the Period Transactions page of the Current & Historical Grants Financial dashboards, and on the Printable Grants Financial dashboard.  The Grants Working Group decided that this should be the main budget used as it reflects what is truly happening during the period the dashboard is run for.

Could Invalid Code Combination issues arise that would cause sponsored budgets not to match what is in OBI vs. GMAS?

Any invalid code combinations made with budget uploads would affect both OBI and GMAS similarly.  There are a couple different budget fields in the OBI Grants Management dashboards.  One of the budget columns match GMAS and the other is true reflection of the budget for the period that was selected in the prompts.  Here is a quick overview:

• Current GL Sponsored Budget: the budget for the life of the subactivity through the night before.  This is similar to what you’d see in GMAS and on the CREW Period Expense Report.
• Project to Date GL Sponsored Budget: the budget for the life subactivity through the To period selected in the prompts.  This budget is what is used primarily on the Period Transactions page of the Current & Historical Grants Financial dashboards, and on the Printable Grants Financial dashboard.  The Grants Working Group decided that this should be the main budget used as it reflects what is truly happening during the period the dashboard is run for.