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Partnering for Progress: The Power of Business Intelligence

January 2, 2025

Have you ever spent hours on a repetitive data task—perhaps it’s a quarterly report or a response to a frequent inquiry—only to wonder, “Is this the best use of my time?”

Are you populating forms, cleaning up spreadsheets, or cross-referencing numbers? What could you accomplish if these processes were streamlined or even automated? More time for strategic projects? Campus outreach? Maybe just a chance to step back and focus on the big picture?

This is where the Business Intelligence (BI) team comes in. We specialize in transforming how you access and use data. Through reports, cubes, and dashboards, we simplify processes, automate workflows, and ensure enterprise data is at your fingertips—limited, of course, to the data you have permission to access. Rooted in partnerships across campus, our work evolves through collaboration, uncovering needs, solving problems, and building solutions that scale with users over time.

A Year in Review: Highlighting Our Work with GCA

While we deliver solutions for many groups across campus, a standout partnership this year has been with Grant and Contract Accounting (GCA). This partnership showcases a variety of solutions, made possible through iterative development, clear communication, and the expertise of several teams across campus.

A special thanks to the following groups within UW Finance, Planning & Budgeting for their time and expertise, which were essential for our work with GCA:

  • DATAGroup – Provided subject matter expertise on finance and grant data.
  • Shared IT Services (specifically Nate Ayres) – Migrated legacy data to the Central Finance Reporting Database (CFRDB) and created views within this database for cross-era reporting.

This section highlights many of the BI solutions delivered for GCA in 2024.

Federal Financial Report (SF425) Suite

The SF425 report, or Federal Financial Report, standardizes the submission of financial data for individual grant awards, ensuring compliance with federal reporting requirements. Submitting the SF-425 form is essential to comply with regulations, maintain funding, secure future grants, and preserve strong agency relationships—without the SF425 report, there is no funding.

Previously, GCA manually populated these reports, which was time-consuming, error-prone, and complicated by the need for cross-era data in the post-Finance Transformation environment.

The BI team’s solutions have streamlined this process, providing three SF425-related tools in the BI Portal to support submission requirements.

  • Federal Financial Report (SF425) – This report generates two outputs, which capture a grant’s cumulative expenses. Outputs include:
    • A completed SF425 form, with data in the correct format
    • Close Out Documents (PI Letter, Primary/Non-Primary Detail, and Close Out Actions)
  • Federal Financial Report (SF425) NASA – This report consolidates all NASA Federal Financial Reports (covering approximately 90 UW awards) into a single file for bulk upload. NASA is the only sponsor that accepts this format.
  • SF425 – Bulk Process – This report generates a file that lists all awards, including metadata, that meet the selected parameters and have an Award Task Status of Not Started. This file is then used in an automated flow to produce SF425 report PDFs for each award without manual input.

Report of Expenditures (ROE)

Similar to the SF425 suite, the Report of Expenditures (ROE) automates a previously manual process for non-federal UW financial reporting when no sponsor format exists.

To support cross-era reporting, this interim ROE report supplements the Workday ROE report (July 2023 – present) by providing the legacy data needed for interim ROE reporting.

Calculated vs. Actual Indirect Cost Report

This report helps users ensure actual indirect costs (IDC) for a budget were calculated correctly. This report compares IDC transactions to the calculated IDC rate and the budget’s actual Facilities and Administration (F&A) expenditures. This allows users to determine whether IDC expenses for a Workday award were calculated correctly or if an adjustment is required.

Federal Interest by Federal Grant

This report tracks daily interest earned on federally funded grants when cash on hand exceeds expenditures. The University owes interest on the difference, calculated daily and remitted annually to the federal government. This one report replaces two reports that were used in the pre-Workday era: Total Interest by Federal LOC Grant and Total Interest by Federal Invoiceable Budget.

Legacy System Retirement Reports

As part of the broader UW-IT initiative to retire legacy systems, the BI team collaborated with GCA to ensure continued access to BGT and FIN/FAS data in preparation for the retirement of these systems. The following reports were created through this collaboration:

  • Grant and Contract Accounting Budget Revisions Report (BGT)
  • Budget Number Index Audit Trail (FIN/FAS)

A Report Tag to Tie it All Together

With all the new reports in GCA’s toolbox, they needed a better way to manage them. To do this, a Grant and Contract Accounting tag was added to quickly drill-down to GCA reports, including all of the new reports mentioned above. This tag is available as a tile on the BI Portal Home page and also as a filter on the Catalog page.

A screenshot of the Browse by Tags section of the BI Portal Home page. The Grant and Contract Accounting tile is outlined with a red box.
The Grant and Contract Accounting Tile on the BI Portal Home Page

Questions/Feedback/Ideas?

Would you like to partner with Business Intelligence on a report, cube, or dashboard? Please submit a ticket to help@uw.edu with “BI Portal” in the subject line.