SPAERC & SERA
Updates to Post-Award Change (PAC)
In order to improve the data quality, reporting, and analytics around award data, the following changes have been made to the Post-Award Change in SPAERC and SERA:
- Addition of Revised Start Date field, displayed for the PAC Requested Change type “Start Date Change”
- Addition of Revised End Date field, displayed for PAC Requested Change types “Extension”, “Early Termination”, or “Relinquishment”
- Addition of Temporary End Date field, displayed for PAC Requested Change type “Temporary Budget Extension” (formerly called “Advanced Extension”)
- Addition of Modification Number field
- Addition of Originating Sponsor Award Number field, which will pre-populate from the parent FA data, when present.
Updates to PAC Notification PDF
The above new PAC fields will also be displayed on the PDF attachment that is sent to campus when a PAC has been processed.
Updates to Pending Actions Report
The above new PAC fields are also included on the GCA Pending Actions Report
PAC Requested Change Type Updates
The following changes have been made to existing PAC types:
- “Advanced Extension” is now relabeled as “Temporary Budget Extension”
- “Significant Financial Interest” has been removed
- “Create Program Income” has been removed
- “Change of Award” has been removed
- “Change in Authorized Action” has been removed
The removed PAC Requested Change types will continue to display on historical PACs.
Update to Cycle View of PAC Data
When in the SPAERC or SERA Cycle view, the PAC row will now display the new Revised Start Date, Revised End Date, and Temporary End Date fields when populated.
Intellectual Property Provisions validation message update
The validation message that appears when the Intellectual Property Provisions question is not answered will now match the current question label, for added clarity.
SERA only: Future budget biennium selection removed
The Budget Biennium field, updated by GCA in many of the items in SERA, will no longer show future biennium dates for selection. This change will help prevent erroneous biennium selections.
FIX: Unprocessing of FAs/PACs/ADVs Can Cause Errors
Periodically GCA staff need to “unprocess” an item previously completed. When new fields are added to SPAERC and SERA, it would at times cause validation messages at time of unprocessing of an item, that were not able to be corrected by GCA. The system has been updated to suppress validations during unprocessing, to alleviate this problem. The validations will again run when the item is re-processed.
Updates
Links to New SERA User Guide
Additional help icons (question marks) have been added to SERA. These link to contextual help in the new SERA User Guide.
Fixes
Error when Inactivating Advances
An issue that was causing users to receive an error when trying to discard advances has been fixed.
Features
Expose Cycle Details tab in SERA
GCA can now view cycle details from SERA. This provides GCA staff with greater visibility to the relationship between items, and makes it easier to quickly research the chronology of an award.
Subcontracts open in a new browser window in SERA
Subcontracts in SERA will now always open in a new browser window and will include navigation to related cycle items.
Features
Allow GCA to delete their own attachments
GCA is now able to delete erroneously uploaded attachments to the funding action and post-award change in SERA. When an attachment is deleted, a note is added to the item recording who deleted the attachment and at what time.
Bug Fixes
Sponsored Program Activity Type and Clinical Trial Phase validations will no longer be applied in SERA
Sponsored Program Activity Type and Clinical Trial Phase, which are read-only fields on the FA in SERA, were at times generating validation errors in SERA when the fields contained missing or invalid entries. The system has been updated to no longer trigger these validations in SERA. The validation rules will be applied only in SPAERC, and FAs already in GCA or completed prior to these fields being added to the system will not be subject to the validation rules.
FA or PAC returned by GCA getting bad dates when flipped and re-sent
When an item is converted from PAC to FA or FA to PAC the “Received in GCA” date is no longer defaulted to 01/01/0001. Instead, it now shows the actual “Received in GCA” date for the item.
Bug Fix
Older FAs in SERA have problems opening
An issue that had prevented Funding Actions that predated the creation of the Authorized Action field from being opened in SERA has been fixed.
Features
View FA Sponsored Program Activity Type from SERA
The new Sponsored Program Activity Type field will be viewable on the Funding Actions in SERA.
Update SERA Pending Activities Report with Sponsored Program Activity Type and Institutional Activity Category fields
The “Export Pending Actions” report in SERA will be updated to include the new Institutional Activity Category, and the Type of Award field will be replaced with the new Sponsored Program Activity Type field.
Features
Make Short Title field uppercase
The Short Title field for FA or PAC inherits the original value from its parent eGC1 which typically is a mixed case entry. A change has been made to always store and display this field in uppercase in SERA independent of the eGC1. This will help speed up data entry as GCA staff can directly copy and paste the data in FIN, and the budget name will already be in uppercase as required by FIN.
Include new FA and PAC data elements in extract
About 30 additional FA/PAC fields have been identified by GCA and added to the data extract (through “Export Pending Actions” from the “Search” tab in SERA). The new fields are added to the end of the file, and the GCA flag is listed as 9 separate yes/no columns on the report. The addition of these fields will help speed up the budget setup process as GCA staff won’t need to look for the information elsewhere.
Make FA “Total Cost Share Amount” Field format Numeric
The “Total Cost Share Amount” field on an FA (previously alphanumerical format) has been cleaned up and all historic non-numeric data has been purged (approved by OSP). The field has been reformatted to accept numeric values only. It is allowed to be empty when the Cost Share flag is “no”, and a numeric value or zero is required when Cost Share is “yes” per business rules. This change will help with cost share amount calculation and match that to Cost Share Summary in eFECS. As a result of this change, the reporting field “totalCostShareAmount” in the Award table in the EDW 1.0 database RAD has also been updated to numeric.
Update auto-generated ADV emails and add to Admin tools
The auto-generated campus notification emails (for FA, PAC and ADV) have been edited by GCA and updated in SERA. The content of these emails is now stored in the admin database and can now be managed through the SAGE admin tool. A new admin UI “SAGE/SERA” (similar to SAGE/SPAERC) is yet to be developed so GCA staff can access this admin tool and manage the content of these emails. This task will be included in a future release (to be prioritized and scheduled).
Features
Subcontract UI changes
The SERA system has been updated to show the full PO number for all types of PO’s that could be used for subcontracts (T requisition numbers, Ariba EI and BPO numbers). SERA subcontract search has been updated to allow for searching on PAS and ARIBA type of PO numbers.
Bug Fix
99 Error triggered in SERA by angle brackets in FA and PAC comments and history
99 errors should no longer appear in SERA when angle brackets are used in comments on FAs and PACs.
