Grants can be planned using a different fiscal calendar than the rest of the budget

Description

This functionality allows organizations to manage and plan their grant funding separately from other areas of their budget, taking into account the unique timing and disbursement models associated with the grant funding process.

Example Use Case

Scenario: A university receives several grants with different disbursement schedules, often not aligned with the academic or fiscal year of the university. The existing CPM software tracks all financials based on the university's fiscal year, which creates complexity in aligning grant fund availability with specific budgetary needs.

Solution: They implement new CPM software that allows for multiple fiscal years, mapping them to a master fiscal year that matches the university. This allows the organization to accurately predict the realization of grant funds and eliminate the manual data mapping exercise in Excel.

Considerations

Managing multiple fiscal calendars can be complex and will pose a challenge for most CPM systems on the market, even the most enterprise-class. We find that the systems best equipped to do this well use Time as a dimension, allowing alternate hierarchies to be used for the various fiscal calendars. The benefit to this is that it allows the administrators to map multiple alternate hierarchies to one master version, enabling a low to no maintenance roll-up. It also allows for those alternate hierarchies to be re-used should multiple grants match the same fiscal calendar.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

• Alternate Fiscal Calendars: Can your CPM system handle multiple fiscal calendars, and is it capable of assigning a different fiscal calendar to specific dimensions like grants? Can those alternate fiscal calendars be re-used by multiple grants?
• Calendar Mapping: How does the system roll-up various fiscal calendars to a master calendar?
• Adding a Grant: Can you show me how to add and configure a grant in the system?