General Guidelines for Budgeting

Budget Acronyms and Terms:

Acronym	Full Title
Budget Tool	Online budgeting system
CE	Current Estimated Budget
COB	Consolidated Operating Budget
DWR	Data Warehouse Financial Reporting
EXPS	Expenses
ICR	Indirect Cost Recoveries
Pivot Tables	Multidimensional views of data on a spreadsheet
Subcode	4-digit number assigned to a type of expense or revenue
YTD	Year to Date

Financial Reports:

FIN ERP

Note: Columbia University is in the process of transitioning from its previous financial system to a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Information about the ERP will be posted here as it becomes available. Training and information sessions will be held at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and will be announced via email.

DARTS

DARTS (Departmental Advanced Tracking and Reporting System) is a web-based application that makes a diverse set of University financial data available to financial administrators and allows them to run a variety of management reports. The two most commonly used at LDEO are:

Rollup Report
- Illustrates budgets, actuals, and encumbrance activity by fiscal period. These reports can be generated to reflect a single account or all accounts that roll up to a specific division.

Account Detail Statement
- Illustrates the same information as the Rollup Report, but it is used only for a single account.

FFE

FFE (Financial Front End) allows users to create, approve routing, and carry out nightly transmission of edited financial data directly from their computers to the Columbia University Financial Accounting System (FAS), Labor Distribution System (LDS), and the Purchasing System (CAPS). FFE data is automatically reconciled to FAS daily, and current financial data is available through various reports. In Budget & Planning, FFE is most commonly used to produce:

Indirect Cost Accounting Codes – SL (INDCOST)
- This report produces a list of all Sub-ledger sponsored project accounts that have an ICR and shows attributes related to grant accounts such as: school, department number, description, option code, overhead rate, indirect account #, agency code, overhead subcode, and method code. For Budget & Planning the account, description, rate, and agency are used most often.

Account Inquiry
- Allows a department manager to view and print account details and related attributes, e.g. long description, begin and end dates, or ICR

Consolidated Operating Budget (COB) Report

A COB report is chosen to produce an Account Detail File, which is an all inclusive report of financial activities that can be run for any division depending on a staff members security access and is the foundation for most financial analysis performed at LDEO. The COB depicts YTD expenses, previous YTD expenses for the same period, year-end expenses for the previous closed fiscal year, two subsequent fiscal year budgets, subcodes, transaction descriptions, division IDs, etc.

Sponsored Projects:

Existing Awards

When creating a report for existing awards, use the available budget templates that can be found here.

Make sure to both prorate planned spending based on project start and end dates and apply ICR rates paying attention to subcodes with reduced or no ICR.

Anticipated Awards

When estimating spending on anticipated awards, the person developing the budget should review the grant proposals with the project’s Principal Investigator.

A budget should be developed only if there is an 85% or greater chance of project funding, which can be compared to historical grant data for reasonableness.

Final estimates should be kept conservative and estimates should be prorated for project startups that do not begin on July 1^st.

Proxy Accounts:

Proxy Accounts are used within the budget tool to aggregate budgets for a single division’s sponsored project budget.

Executive Summary:

Executive summaries serve as cover pages for budgets in order to provide narratives to accompany budget submissions. They highlight assumptions, describe the programs, and explain variances. For a sample executive summary, click here.

Forecasting Analyses:

Budget monitoring is an ongoing activity at LDEO. Projections are performed quarterly and require variance explanations by all divisions for the current fiscal year. Quarterly reviews are performed in October, January, April, and July/August. For a complete description of the budget cycle, click here.