Understanding Award Processing Dates

This article describes how Contracts and Grants Accounting (CGA) establishes and updates processing begin and end dates for applicable awards.

Key Concepts

For each award recorded in the Research Administration System (RAS), CGA establishes one or more project and project activity period. Generally, a unique project activity period is established for each budget period of the award.

Each project activity period in RAS includes a Processing Begin Date and Processing End Date. Processing begin and end dates determine when financial transactions may be recorded in the General Ledger (GL) against any established project activity period. Combo/Edit rules are in place in UCSF’s financial systems to prevent posting of financial expenditures outside of the established processing date range. This includes both payroll and non-payroll activity, such as funding entry, salary cost transfers, and benefit cost transfers recorded in UCPath; purchases via BearBuy; and expense reimbursements processed through MyExpense.

Depending on the terms and conditions of each award, the Processing Begin Date may be earlier than the begin dates established for the project activity period. When established, a Processing End Date may be later than the end dates established for the award, project, or activity period. The time span between the project activity period’s Period End Date and the Processing End Date is known as the Trail Out Period.

How Processing Dates are Determined

Establishing Processing Begin and End Date During Award Setup

Processing Begin Date

CGA uses the Budget Start Date to establish the Processing Begin Date.

If pre-award spending is approved, an earlier Processing Begin Date will be established by adjusting the Budget Start Date by the number of allowable days identified by the sponsor if explicitly stated in the agreement. Upon request, CGA staff will also adjust the Processing Begin Date with appropriate support of approval of pre-award spending.

Processing End Date

For non-federal awards (e.g., private awards, fixed-price awards), CGA will leave the Processing End Date blank. This allows for greater flexibility in the timing of the trail out period as the award or award period comes to a close.

For federal awards, including federal flow through, CGA establishes the award’s Trail Out Period by populating the Processing End Date field in RAS to limit the posting of expenditures after the budget/periodperiod end date.

When the deliverable due date is 65 days or less after the budget/period end date, the Processing End Date will be set to the eighth business day after the GL close for the month following the Period End Date.
Where the deliverable due date is 66 days or later than the budget/project end date, the Processing End Date will be set to the eighth business day after the GL close two full months following the Period End Date.

Exceptions to this may be made based on sponsor expectations and the complexity of the award.

Extending Processing End Dates when Reopening Activity Periods

If a project activity period is inactive at the time of posting, any residual transactions, drawdowns, or other entries will post to a suspense account. CGA strives to work proactively with our department partners and will reopen project activity periods and extend processing end dates upon request in order to prevent suspense activity.

When submitting a request to open an inactive project activity period for the following transaction types, CGA will always extend the Processing End Date by one month from the date of the request. This will set the period to active to allow for the transaction and related transactions to post. This will be the process for all types of requests and award types including:

Adjusting Processing End Dates for Subaward Closeout

Sub-awardees have 60 days to close and invoice UCSF per the contracts; therefore, the last invoice will be received after the Processing End Date.

Accounts Payable (AP) will notify CGA when the invoice, approved by the PI, is received.
CGA will modify the Processing End Date to allow the invoice to be paid, if the invoice is received prior to CGA filing the final deliverable.

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