Setup Considerations: Awards
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of awards. It explains:
- Why to set them up.
- How they fit into the rest of Workday.
- Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
- Security requirements and business process configurations.
- Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.
What They Are
Awards enable you to record details of award contracts so you can expense, bill, and collect revenue on your grant. Awards contain 1 or more award lines that identify a funding source and parameters for calculating revenue.
Business Benefits
You can streamline your awards process and increase efficiency by:
- Associating award spending with the fund, grant, and sponsor.
- Calculating facilities and administration (F&A) or indirect costs on your award spending using the cost rates from your award agreement.
- Capturing all the details that support an award in 1 place, including attachments, budget plans, committed employee efforts, and special conditions.
- Recognizing revenue for your award spends.
- Billing sponsors for direct and indirect award costs.
- Tracking award-maintenance tasks.
Use Cases
- Bill sponsors for cost reimbursable direct spends and F&A costs incurred during a billing cycle.
- Calculate and recognize revenue for F&A costs on your award spending when you complete a cost reimbursable spend transaction.
- Distribute award credits and revenue to multiple departments.
- Enforce spend restrictions, billing limits, or salary caps on awards.
- Waive part or all sponsor F&A costs and split the costs among your departments.
Questions to Consider
Question | Considerations |
|---|---|
How do you want to bill the sponsor? | You can bill the sponsor for these types of award lines:
You can create billing schedules that bill in installments or transactions. You can also control billing with billing milestones. A hybrid billing schedule enables you to bill the sponsors for prepaid amounts, then consume the prepayment over time with cost reimbursable spends. Workday displays the remaining balance for your project in the billing schedule. |
How do you ensure oversight on your award contracts? | You can configure business processes to route award contracts for review and approval when you:
|
How do you charge award-related payroll and other expenditures to your award or grant? | You can charge an award-related payroll or expenditure to a grant by adding the grant worktag to the payroll costing allocation or spend transaction. Workday then determines which award line to charge the spend to based on the grant worktag and budget date on the spend line, and other configurations such as award line dates and object class mapping. To be eligible for F&A calculation and revenue reimbursement, the grant must be from a sponsored fund.
You can associate other worktags with your award spendings by adding the worktags as related worktags on the grant. When you add the grant to a spend transaction, the spend is automatically tagged with the related worktags. Example: To always associate a grant with a specific fund and cost center, add the fund and cost center as related worktags on the grant. |
How do you recover F&A or indirect costs from the award sponsor? | You can configure the F&A rate for your award. When you make or pay for an eligible award expenditure, Workday automatically calculates the F&A costs and revenue recognition associated with the expenditure. You can then bill the sponsor for the direct and indirect costs at the same time. |
When do you want to recognize revenue for your award? | You can recognize revenue:
|
Do you want to apply different F&A cost rates based on the spend categories of your expenditures? | You can create F&A exceptions to apply different F&A rates to different object classes. The same F&A rate applies to all spend categories in the same object class. To apply a different F&A rate from the primary rate, you can either:
|
How do you keep track of changes to your award contract or indirect cost rates? | There are 2 ways to update an award:
You can always access the historical versions of an award. |
What tasks or reports outside of Workday do you need to complete to maintain your award? | You can create award task lists to track milestone tasks that you need to complete before billing or closing out an award. You can use templates to create task lists quickly for awards that share the same sponsor, purpose code, or award type.
You can set up notification to alert milestone task assignees when their tasks are almost due or overdue. When you identify an award task as a billing milestone, Workday ensures that the billing installments aren't billable until you complete the task. |
Do you want to distribute credits to more than 1 organization within an award or enable workers from multiple organizations to report on the award? | You can use award credits to distribute award credits to multiple departments.
When you enable multiorganization reporting on award credits, any workers from organizations with a credit allocation can report on the award. |
Do you require certain fields in your award contracts to be unpopulated or set to specific values? | You can create custom validations in award contract or award amendment to enforce that specific fields on your awards are always either:
You can create custom validations for any fields on the award header, award line, and award roles. Example: You can create a custom validation to ensure that the:
|
Recommendations
- To receive prepayments from the sponsor and deduct spent amounts from the prepayment balance, use a cost reimbursable award line with prepaid billing schedule instead of a prepaid award line.
- Use award tasks to receive notifications about closing tasks or reporting requirements with approaching due dates.
Requirements
- Set up the necessary worktags for your financial accounting.
- To calculate and bill award revenue to the sponsor, use a sponsor-funded fund for your award.
- To maintain award budgets, create a plan structure.
- For cost reimbursable and fixed amount award lines, create object class mapping to map your internal spend categories to the sponsor cost categories. To report budget to actuals on your sponsor invoice, include the object class as a dimension on the plan structure for your award.
Limitations
An award can only contain up to 200 award lines. To support more than 200 award lines, create multiple awards.
You can create sponsor-funded or cost-share awards, but Workday only calculates award costs and recognizes revenue for sponsor-funded awards.
Tenant Setup
Create sequence IDs to assign to new awards.
Access the
Edit Tenant Setup - Financials
task to map the new sequence ID to the ID Generator for Award
.Security
Configure these domains in the Grants Management functional area:
Domain | Considerations |
|---|---|
Process: Award
| Enables you to access tasks and reports related to creating, maintaining, and viewing awards. |
Reports: Award
| Enables you to report on award:
|
Set Up: Grants Management
| Enables you to configure award-supporting details, including grants, F&A configurations, award billing, award task lists, and object class sets. |
To create or edit billing schedules for an award, configure the
Process: Billing
domain in the Customer Contracts or Project Billing functional area.Business Processes
Business Process | Considerations |
|---|---|
Award Event
| Routes a new award contract for review and approval. You can add these action steps as subprocesses:
|
Award Amendment Event
| Routes an award amendment for review and approval. You can add a subprocess to create an award budget amendment. |
Award Billing Schedule Event
| Routes a newly created award to the person responsible for creating the billing schedule for the award. |
Award Proposal Event
| Routes an award proposal for review and approval. |
Award Task Event
| Routes an award task for review and approval when the task assignee marks the award tasks as complete in Workday. |
Reprocess Award Costs Event
| Routes the recalculation of award costs for approval when you reprocess amended award costs. |
Reporting
Reports | Considerations |
|---|---|
Award Credits for Award
Award Credits for Award Lines | Enables you to view the award credits on the awards or award lines of a company. |
Find Award
| Enables you to view the configurations for a specific award. |
Find Award Tasks
| Enables you to list and view all award maintenance tasks. |
Find Awards
| Enables you to list and view all the awards for a given company. |
Find Subrecipients
| Enables you to view the subrecipients of a given award. |
View Sponsor Invoices for Award
| Enables you to list and view the customer invoices you generated for an award. |
Integrations
Web Services | Considerations |
|---|---|
Correct Award
| Correct an award without saving a version of the original award. |
Get Awards
Submit Award | Retrieve or create award contracts.
The Submit Award web service initiates the Award Event business process. |
Get Award Amendment and Correction Reason
Put Award Amendment and Correction Reason | Retrieve, create, or update reasons for award amendments and corrections. You can route award amendments for approval based on these reasons. |
Get Award Credit Definitions
Put Award Credit Definition | Retrieve, create, or update award credit definitions. |
Get Award Lifecycle Statuses
Put Award Lifecycle Status | Retrieve or set award lifecycle statuses for the award or award line. You can create custom validations based on award lifecycle statuses. |
Get Billing Schedules
Submit Billing Schedule | Retrieve, create, or update the billing schedule for an award. |
Get Award Task Statuses
Put Award Task Status | Retrieve or update the status of an award maintenance task. |
Get Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance
Put Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance | Retrieve, create, or update the Assistance Listing information on awards. |
Get Subrecipients
Put Subrecipient | Retrieve, create, or update the subrecipients of an award. A subrecipient must be a supplier for the company associated with the award. |
Submit Award Amendment
| Submit an award amendment and route the amendment for approval. This web service initiates the Award Amendment Event business process. |
Connections and Touchpoints
Features | Considerations |
|---|---|
Banking and Settlement | You can draw down sponsor-payment funds to settle electronic payments and deposits. |
Budgets and Plans | When you create an award plan, you can verify the award funding amount against the plan budgeted amount.
When you maintain an award budget, Workday verifies that spend amounts are within the budget before approving the transactions. |
Customer Accounts | You create sponsor invoices to bill the sponsor. |
Finance | You can charge spend amounts to your award and bill the sponsor for expenditures on functional areas in Finance. Examples: Expense, Inventory, Procurement, and Supplier Accounts. |
Financial Accounting | You can configure the account posting rule to specify the ledger accounts where you want Workday to post journal lines for calculated award costs and revenue recognition.
When you configure object classes to map internal spend categories to the sponsor cost categories, Workday adds the object class worktags to the operational and accounting journals. |
Payroll | You can expense salaries and payroll accounting adjustments to your award grant.
When you assign a salary cap, Workday applies alternate payroll costing worktags to payroll amounts that are:
|
Student Financials | When your award funds student financial aid, you can charge the financial aid to your sponsor for reimbursement. |
Supplier Accounts | Award subrecipients must be suppliers for the company associated with the award. |
Time | You can track the time employees spend on a project to ensure that they meet their committed effort for an award. |
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.