One of the more common administrative transactions applied to grant activities is the assignment of personnel costs to or from the project.
Generally, this entails requesting one of two procedures:
1. Salary Redistribution
This is requested when FUTURE salary payments (and associated benefits) are to be entirely or partially assigned to or removed from a particular grant activity's expenses.
To implement salary redistributions, follow the same procedure described on the Assigning Grant Staff page.
2. Salary Reallocation
This is requested when PAST salary payments (normally, but not necessarily, with associated benefits) are to be added to or removed from a particular grant activity's expenses.
Processing of either transaction is accomplished through the submission of the Salary Reallocation Form.
1. The Principal Investigator (PI) prepares the Salary Reallocation Form.
2. ORS reviews the form and sends to Restricted Accounting for review and processing.
3. The reallocation will take effect within 15 days of submission to Restricted Accounting.
Things to keep in mind
- A salary allocation that involves a grant award is a form of “cost transfer,” defined as an after-the-fact allocation of costs to a sponsored project. Before requesting salary reallocations, PIs should review DePaul’s Guidelines and Procedures for Cost Transfers to Sponsored Projects .
- Principal Investigators should monitor the salary spending on their grants so that if any reallocations need to be processed, they are identified quickly. As a general rule, reallocations should be completed within 90 days of the original transactions. After this point, special consideration of the request is needed, based on additional documentation provided.
- Reallocations for pay periods six or more months in the past are generally not possible owing to potential incompatibilities with Time and Effort reports.
- The closer a redistribution request is to the end of the fiscal year, the likelier that Restricted Accounting will request that the redistribution itself be postponed until the start of the new fiscal year with a reallocation to be done at the end of the current fiscal year.
- If a position is to be redistributed, remember that all people associated with that position are moved to the grant too. Therefore, if a person is to be redistributed into a grant, but he/she is not the only person in that position, then a new position has to be created within that grant (See Hiring Grant Staff) and the individual must be transferred to that new position by either Human Resources (staff) or the Office of Student Employment (students).
Questions regarding this process can be directed to ORS or to Restricted Accounting.