Utilities and SAP Grant Management

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has directed hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to utilities, enabling new projects to get off the ground that otherwise would have never been considered.

What, then, does a utility do to track the grants it applies for and the funds it receives from federal or state agencies? Some utilities are tempted to use an Excel spreadsheet; it's easy to download SAP orders manually, and there's comfort in the application's familiarity. But what are the costs? Let's count them...

    1. Your data is static once you've downloaded it
    2. There's no drilldown functionality for detail support
    3. You can't exclude non-funded costs
    4. You can't summarize accounts into grantor categories automatically
    5. There's a serious risk of manual errors
    6. There's little or no audit capability
    7. There's no document repository

We could come up with additional reasons, but the bottom line is that Excel just won't fly with your external auditor—let alone your grantor, should they want to see how their funds were utilized.

There is a better way. SAP's own Grant Management (GM) module is ideal for tracking every grant dollar received, and it integrates seamlessly with your existing SAP infrastructure (including FM, FI, and CO in particular). GM displays each grant's lifecycle and status, and allows you to establish financial conditions, legal rules, and allowable project expenses.

After Grant Management is implemented, you'll be able to see a running total of the money remaining in each grant, plus have easy access to all of the details for each expense. This degree of transparency makes grant management a no-brainer, and we're recommending that many of our clients consider it seriously. In a future post, we'll get into some of the technical details you should know when implementing the GM module.