Scheduling Payments

Program staff is responsible for setting up the payments on a grant. During compliance review of the proposal and before accrual of the grant or approval of the payment, GM should keep in mind the following:

Depending on how familiar the program is with the grantee, the length of the grant term, and the nature of the grant activities, payments are usually scheduled at the beginning of the grant term and after interim reports are due. (Some Budapest programs schedule a final payment as a reimbursement after receipt of the final financial report to make sure that the grantee is not given more funding than needed.) Verify that the payment dates are in line with the reporting dates. The program must be realistic about how long it will take to review and approve reports when scheduling payments. For example, in most cases it is highly unlikely that the program will review a report and be ready to make payment on the same day. The recommendation is that installments should be scheduled 30 days after interim reporting due dates. Alert the program staff to discrepancies in payment scheduling.

Grants officers should update the scheduled date of the first payment if significant time has passed since it was entered and it is no longer realistic. Scheduled payment dates are used for cash forecasting, so if a program staff person entered payments six months prior to the grant agreement being issued, it is likely that the first payment is out of sync with reality. As stated above, subsequent payments should remain in line with interim report dates. In rare cases, if subsequent payments are not tied to scheduled reports, their scheduled dates may need to be updated as well.

Under payment details account code, payment type, status, category of work, lobby/non-lobby bifurcation (for OSI-BP grants), contingent criteria status, payment date, payee and its bank details, fund class, fixed non-USD and fixed FX payment amount, comment to accounting for invoice numbers should be checked.

For grants over $500,000, multiple payments of $250,000 or less should be scheduled instead of single-installment payments, unless the program can justify otherwise.

Coding Errors: Before accruing a grant, make sure that the payments are coded to the correct accounting codes. In addition, if there are two or more programs supporting a grant, the sum of the payments must equal the total amount charged to each budget. There is also a system alert in FC.

Currencies Other than US Dollars: In most cases OSF transfers USD. However, GBP and EUR transfers can be requested by the grantee. OSF can make payments in other currencies as well. The Finance department knows which currencies FOSI’s or OSI-BP’s bank can process. If payments are made in another currency, the proposal budget should be expressed in that currency with a dollar equivalent.

In order to schedule payments in other currencies, program staff must choose the currency type of the payment:

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