As mentioned in our last blog post, the Office of Management and Budget’s Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards (“Uniform Guidance”) introduced a new requirement for entities that pass federal funds (“pass-through entities”) to non-profit entities or other governments, to monitor those subrecipients.

​We provided a list of terms and definitions related to subrecipient monitoring in part one of our subrecipient monitoring mini blog series.
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Below, we go over what the Uniform Guidance’s requirement entails, and how to structure your subrecipient monitoring accordingly.

The Office of Management and Budget’s Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards (“Uniform Guidance”) made it a requirement for any entity that passes federal funds (the “pass-through entity”) to non-profit entities or other governments to monitor those subrecipients.
 
 
In this blog post below, we explain and define major terms regarding subrecipient monitoring and its related procedures.

Many government agencies use purchasing card programs for their employees now.
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Audits of purchasing card programs are conducted to determine the following 3 things:

Read below what the recommended best practice for audits is.

Many California local governments participate in the State of California’s Cal-Card procurement card program. The State contracted with U.S. Bank National Association to provide Visa credit cards to authorized State employees, and has opened the program for any local government in California that wants to participate.

Read on to learn more details about what the Cal-Card program's purpose is. 

A lot has been written about how to select a new audit firm, including lots of examples for requests for proposals (RFP) and example scoring criteria.

​One of the most important elements of the auditor selection process, however, that not much has been written about, is the reference checking for new possible audit firms.
So, below we describe an approach and provide a list of sample questions to ask during reference checking when you’re in the process of selecting a new audit firm.

An important task for any finance department is account reconciliation.
Items recorded as assets and liabilities at some point usually get paid, collected, depreciated or disposed; however, the related accounting entry to remove these items from the balance sheet does not always get made.

For example, an operating department may dispose of a capital asset without notifying the finance department or a cash collection may have been recorded as a revenue instead of an offset to the receivable. Without regular account analyses, these types of errors can accumulate on the balance sheet causing both balance sheet accounts and revenues/expenses to be misstated by a significant amount. 

See the 5 steps to good account reconciliation procedure below.

​Properly managing grants is a complex, and sometimes tedious, process. In recent posts, we have addressed some best practices in managing grants including written procedures, status reports, monitoring sub-grantees, maintaining proper records, planning and close-out meetings, and deciding whether to centralize or to decentralize grants management.
 
In this post, we discuss another best practice to consider in managing grants – the use of a grants management workgroup. Below, we discuss who should participate in the workgroup, what the workgroup’s agenda should be, the recommended frequency of meetings, and the role of the facilitator in the workgroup.

​Since the grants management process is usually decentralized, your agency’s effectiveness and efficiency in managing grants depends heavily on how well employees in Finance communicate with the grants managers in various departments.
 
In this post below, we’ll explain how to achieve the best-possible results for governments grants management by incorporating planning and close-out meetings into your agenda.

In our last post, we explained whether the grants management process should be centralized or decentralized, and why.

In this post below, we'll look at how to keep better track of your grants.

When it comes to Grants Management, governments often need to identify whether a centralized or a decentralized approach is better. In the blog post below, we’ll explain the differences between a centralized and decentralized grants management process, and cover which one is preferable for a more efficient grants management.