Overview
The Grants Forecasting application is a large-scale enterprise solution developed to provide departments the ability to forecast and budget at a grant/project specific level (entity 05 accounts only). It is part of the University's Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Services suite (PBCS) also known as Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).
Detail
Grants Forecasting gathers data from General Ledger, PittWorx, Purchasing, RPA, and SPAR. The tool lets you see the impact of future grant expenses, including compensation and non-compensation costs. Fiscal Panther gathers data from Concur, PantherExpress, PERIS, Pitt Worx, and PRISM which includes General Ledger, Payables, PCard, Purchasing, RPA, and SPAR.
The initiative represents a collaboration between the Budget and Financial Reporting Office (opens in a new tab) and Pitt Digital (opens in a new tab) and is based on department requests for centrally-supported grants management tools. These tools provide users with an alternative to department purchased grants management software.
Data from this application is exported nightly to the Fiscal Panther Hub (opens in a new tab) dashboards created to provide University administrators greater visibility into all financial data in one platform, including transaction level details.
Key Benefits
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Automated daily updates to data sources that collectively promote process efficiency and allow you to manage both current grants-related data and projections without additional data entry
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System driven calculations for indirect costs, mandatory cost share, fringe benefits, and annual salary increases
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An automated tool to assist you in generating your grant forecasting projections, analyzing grant trends, and compiling reports
Steps to Get Started
Access to Grants Forecasting is granted through completion of a user form. For access to the corresponding Fiscal Panther Hub dashboards, users must also have access to the GL Mart. GL Mart access is requested through the Federated Authorization process (opens in a new tab).
To request access:
- Complete the Grants Forecasting user form on SharePoint (opens in a new tab).
- Submit the form to Pitt Digital via a help ticket.
- User guide information can be found on the applications Grants Forecasting SharePoint site (opens in a new tab).
To use Grants Forecasting:
- Log in to myPitt (my.pitt.edu) (opens in a new tab)
- Search for “Grants Forecasting,” then select the task from the results.
- At the Oracle Cloud sign in page, click Pitt Passport login option at the bottom of the page
- If not already logged in, enter your University Computing Account username and password, then click Sign In.
More Resources
Posted General Ledger data is loaded to the PBCS Grants Forecasting application on a nightly basis, Monday through Friday. As a reminder, GL month-end closing generally happens three business days into the following month. When running reports on the first of the month for the prior month, not all transactions will be posted for month end yet. For example, Payroll Costing is not posted until the last day of the closing cycle. For more information, see Understanding Data Timing (opens in a new tab).
Beginning April 1, 2019, encumbrance values are calculated in PRISM, summarized by account number, and exported nightly to PBCS. The detail for these encumbrances found in the Loaded Encumbrance columns may be obtained in PRISM by running the new report, FGAE138 Extract of Calculated Encumbrances by Entity and Department (PDF, opens in a new tab).
What if there is a Fiscal Panther feature that I would like to request?
Please contact the Technology Help Desk at 412-624-HELP (4357). Your request will be reviewed and an analyst from Pitt Digital will follow up with you.
Who do I contact with questions about Grants Forecasting?
Please contact the Technology Help Desk at 412-624-HELP (4357) if you have any questions.