I need help from those on the accounting and post-award side of things. Our grants accountant wants faculty to pinpoint down to the week and month and sometimes even day when in the summer payments will occur instead of allocating the funds throughout the entire summer for a project. This gets to be problematic when a faculty member has multiple grants.
For example, Dr. X has an NSF grant funding 1 summer month, NIH funding .5. He'll be working on both throughout the summer, but the accountant wants to pointpoint that he will get paid in say June for Grant 1, and July for Grant 2 so there is no overlap. My thinking is, that a faculty member can work on two grants at the same time in the sense of they can be working on NSF in the morning and NIH in the afternoon. It doesn't make sense to force them to separate them completely for payments. Am I wrong? Is there a reason not to just pay both throughout the course of the entire summer recognizing that is when the work is taking place and the NSF would add up to 1 month of work once the summer is completed and the NIH would add up to .5? We've gotten down to having to factor by specific days, for example, this person will be paid from May 17 through June 17 and then for this other grant they will be paid from June 18 whenever.