When using work-based billing in Oracle Grants, some customers (or groups of customers) may have strict requiremens as to what can be billed on to them. In order to prevent ineligible expenditure being charged to an award (project), Allowed Cost Schedules are used. An ‘Allowed Cost Schedule’ is simply a list of expenditure types that is assigned to an award (project) that governs which expenditure types can be charged to the award (project). Put simply, if an expenditure type is not in an Allowed Cost Schedule, then it can not be charged to the award (project).

 

Allowed Cost Schedule form in Oracle Grants

In Oracle Projects (and also Oracle Grants), one might use Transaction Controls to restrict which expenditure types can be charged to an award (project). There are two drawbacks/limitations with this:-

1. Maintenence overhead. Transaction controls have to be set for each project. In my experience there are usually groups of projects within an organiation (perhaps they all have the same customer) that require the same transaction controls. The drawback of using Transaction Control functionality is that if a new expenditure type is set up, then the expenditure type needs to be added to the transaction controls for every project. If Allowed Cost Schedules were available in Oracle Projects, all of the projects that require the same transaction controls could share one schedule; any new expenditure types only need to be added to the one schedule.
2. Visibility in Payables / Purchasing. When entering a Projects requisition/PO/invoice distribution in AP/PO, the check to see if any transaction controls have been violated is only carried out when the record is saved. This is rather user-unfriendly, as it allows one to choose a seemingly valid expenditure type from a list of values, proceed with data entry, to only then be confronted with an error message when the record is saved. With Allowed Cost Schedules, the expenditure type list of values in AP/PO is restricted based on which expenditure types are in the schedule i.e. The entry clerk can only select a valid (allowable) expenditure type from the list of values.

I am not suggesting that Allowed Cost Schedules replace Transaction Controls in Oracle Projects, but using the two pieces of functionaity together in Oracle Grants works very well. Although Allowed Cost Schedules are associated at the ‘award’ level in Oracle Grants, they could easily be incorporated in Oracle Projects at project level.

In the very least, regarding point 2 above, the expenditure type list of values should pre-validate against transaction controls. This would certainly make a lot of Payables people I know very happy!

I would be interested to hear if anyone else would find this feature useful, and more importantly, raise an Enhancement Request.