What Is Effort Reporting and Certification?

An effort report is a statement certifying the payroll distribution and cost sharing charges accurately reflect effort expended. Effort reporting and certification is a requirement for most sponsored research; organizations must certify the effort expended on various projects to their sponsors. Effort reporting applies to employees working on sponsored projects. An effort report can show the actual percent of pay to an employee for a pay period, the planned effort, actual effort expended, and the funding sources from which the employee was paid.

The effort report divides an employee's effort into sponsored and non-sponsored sections. The sponsored section includes cost sharing.

• Sponsored effort are activities where the Sponsored Effort field is Yes on Activity (AC10.1).

• Cost share effort are activities defined as cost share on Cost Sharing (GM01.2)

• Non-sponsored effort are activities where the Sponsored Effort field is No on Activity (AC10.1), or for effort posted to general ledger accounts only (and no activity).

To create effort records, you must set effort reporting on the employee record (Grant Management (HR11.3)).

If you want to include planned effort on your effort report, you must enable labor distribution on the employee record and process labor distribution templates.

If you do not want to include planned effort on your effort report, effort transactions based only on actual pay can be created either with labor distribution templates or with regular time records.

Your organization can address effort retroactively. In some cases, effort will drive the redistribution of salary costs to grants. What Are Labor Cost Transfers?