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Effort Reporting

Situations where total effort shown on ECC Effort Statements does not equal exactly 100% fall under one of these two situations:

  1. ECC Rounding causing total effort to be greater/less than 100.00% by margins ~0.01%: All effort statements are a reflection of 100% of the listed individual's total institutional activity, regardless of their actual FTE. However, each field on an effort statement is rounded to the hundredth's place individually, prior to any grand total being calculated. In some situations, this causes the total "Computed Effort" amount on the statement to stray from 100% by a margin of a couple hundredths of a percent. For the purposes of effort reporting at UW, this small of a margin from 100.00% is de minimis, and the certification can be completed as is.
  2. Changes after pre review, causing "Certified Effort" values to be unaligned with "Computed Effort": Total effort can be significantly over 100% when this occurs, necessitating refresh or "reset" of the statement. Any user can fix this by clicking the "Reset Statement" button in the top left corner of the effort statement - screenshot

The University does not track hours or have a time-tracking system; Workday allocates costs based on payroll costing allocations and the University’s effort system, ECC, is used as an after-the-fact system to document that the charges reasonably reflect the employee’s (faculty or non-faculty) total activity on sponsored and non-sponsored awards. 

If a sponsor is requiring hours or hourly rates on budget forms or other proposal documentation, we recommend adding the language below to the budget justification:

“Although the sponsor’s budget forms required us to enter personnel costs and effort in terms of hours and hourly rates, these are provided solely for comparison purposes. The University of Washington does not track, or maintain documentation of, hours worked for its faculty and staff. Rather, the University maintains documentation to support time committed to projects for faculty and non-faculty based on percentages of effort, in accordance with the provisions of 2 CFR 200.430(h)(2) and FAR 31.3.”

If a sponsor will not issue an award or payments without a commitment from the University to track hours, and the PI accepts the award, it is the responsibility of the PI/Department to track hours in such a manner that is acceptable to the sponsor. 

An Administrative PI is assigned to a sponsored award when a Project PI has a conflict of interest or in other scenarios where it is necessary to have another PI review submissions, reports, or fiscal management.

In Workday, the Administrative PI is assigned as “PI” to ensure all Workday approvals will flow to that individual for review. Because the Administrative PI is assigned as the PI in Workday, the Administrative PI will also be assigned as the “Certifier” for Project Statements in ECC.

The Effort Coordinator may use the “designee” function in ECC to assign the certification of a Project Statement(s) from the Administrative PI to the Project PI. 

assigning-a-designee-to-a-project-statement.pdf

A note should be added to all applicable Project Statements to the following effect:

Certification of this statement was assigned to the Project PI [NAME] from the Administrative PI [NAME].”


Post Award Fiscal Compliance email: gcafco@uw.edu

For questions and issues relating to Effort Reporting, email: effortreporting@uw.edu

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