SSBCI Technical Assistance Grants Disbursement Request Training

Lilian Lowrey: All right. I'm joined here today by portion of the SSBCI team and we're going to be covering quite a few things. Next slide please. And as I stated earlier, we will be recording and we'll be distributing the slides to you after this office hours is over. If you got a link, I have your e-mail address. So we'll have that distribution list and also we'll be distributing it via the bulletin link. So if you get our bulletin, you will also get this recording and the training through that manner. So today we're doing an overview of the disbursement request process, which will cover a little bit of background. The forms you have to complete, the internal compliance review that we have to complete internally and data validations and submissions process. We'll then do a walkthrough of the two forms you're going to be completing to initiate a tranche disbursement. We're going to be doing a portal demo and we're going to answer any questions you may have that apply to the subject. Next slide, please. So this is the timeline that we're going to follow for the processing for a review of any tranche disbursement request. So it initiates with the completion of two forms, which then leads to internal data validations, some automatic and some manual. We do a compliance review and we then disperse your funds. We anticipate that this process will take 45 days to complete. And if you're also involved in the capital side of SSBCI, you're going to see it's a much shorter time frame. So hopefully we'll be able to again address all your concerns. Next slide please. So a little bit of background. If you do have a grant with us, you probably read our grants guidelines or you have seen an FAQ that specifies how Treasury disburses TA grant program funds. Each award will have specific information that is accomplished, but any grants that were last at $250,000 or less are distributed all at once. If it is over $250,000, they are distributed in three tranches of 33%, 33% and then the remaining 34%. We tried to round those numbers. So if you see that something's a little off, it's going to be by less than a dollar. One thing I want to mention here for larger awards where we have the first disbursement of funds occur promptly following the receipt of the funding agreement. I want to clarify that for as SBOP funds, we're doing things a little bit different. So if you're an SBOP awardee, the disbursement of funds will happen after the full grant agreement is signed. I'm going to pass over to my colleague Terrie Riley that will continue the remainder of the training. Terrie Riley: Good afternoon everyone and happy New Year because this is the first time many of you have communicated with us. And so I will pick up with a timeline that Lillian mentioned before. To initiate the process, we start with your SF 425. And so the first instance of that we will see doing your semi annual report, you will submit it. And at that point we will kind of see if you are approaching that 80% threshold. And so we'll reach out to you to verify that you have reached that 80% threshold. And then, if you have reached it at the advent of your semi annual report, then we can use that SF 425 to initiate the process. However, if you are close but not quite, we will ask that you resubmit your 425 when you have reached that 80% threshold. And the way that we calculate that or surmise if you have reached that threshold is if we're looking at your share of expenditures as well as the unliquidated obligations and by unliquidated obligations, we primary that is any obligations you've made contractual otherwise but have not yet made disbursements for those. Next slide. And so also in addition to the 425, what we're looking also is an is a brief narrative describing primarily how your project is progressing. We're looking to see how you've used those funds, how it supports your project. You know, particularly have you made any progress in terms of the goals and, and the benchmarks that you described in your TA plan? And so we'll be just looking at that and, and also looking at your spend rate, we're looking at how you are progressing towards the accomplishment of those goals and how quickly or the lack of progress or progress you're making on your project plan as well. So in addition to your 425, your project narrative, we'll also be asking you to submit a disbursement request form. Next slide please. And so this is similar to your capital program but different in a way because primarily what we're looking for here, we will provide you with a pre populated form and that primarily will be the budget that you submitted with your approved TA plan. We will have those amounts in a budget template. We would ask that you report your actuals expenditures against those budget categories and then we'll look to see exactly if you are on track, if you're over, under, and then in some cases, if you are over your amount, then we will ask that you submit a budget modification form so that we have the correct amount that is spent according to what you you've been projecting in your in your forms. And with that form, you'll have an overview of your spending information, which will primarily show that you've reached at 80% threshold. We'll have your budget details and then we'll also ask for the narrative which shows your project progress. And additionally, any contractual cost, which will primarily involve your sub recipient spending or any other issues that you would like to highlight within your contractual cost section. At this time, I'll turn it over to Anya and she'll go into a deeper dive on the 425 completion as well of the disbursement request form. Anya Sorensen: OK, So you should all be able to see my screen. We are going to start with going over the SF 425. You should all be familiar with this form as it is also used for your semi annual reporting. So we'll go through it a little bit faster. So number one is federal agency and organizational element to which report is submitted. That is SSBCI. 2 is your federal grant or other identifying number. You should be able to find that on your award documents as well as any previously submitted reports to us. The third item here is information about your recipient organization, including the name, the address, and the state, the postal code. So that should all be of your eligible recipient designee. 4A is your UEI number and something to flag here is that 4A is a great way to tell if you're using the most up to date version of this form. If you see anything here that says Duns number, you are using an old version of the form and you should go download the new version from the portal and Jay will walk through how you can do that later on in this presentation. 4B is your EIN. 5 recipient account number or identifying number. So number six is report type. This is your disbursement review for this report. You can leave that blank. 7 is your basis of accounting if you use a cash or accrual based system. 8 is your project or grant period, Which you can find on your award documents. If you have submitted semi annual reports in the past, you can also look to your previously submitted reports. And if you did report your grant dates wrong on any of the past submitted reports, you should have communication from SSBCI letting you know of the most of the correct dates. So please make sure to check if you have any communication regarding your grant period dates as well. And then 9 is the reporting period end date and that would be the date of what you're submitting your disbursement review. We understand there might be a few day discrepancy depending on when this form is completed and when your submission is certified in the portal, but we wouldn't expect to see more than a few days. So now we can move on to 10 (transactions) and we'll start with the federal cash section. A is cash receipts and this should equal the funds you have received from Treasury. So if you have only received your first tranche, this should equal your first tranche of funding-- the funds you have received from Treasury. B is cash disbursements and this should equal your funds dispersed for direct charges for goods and services, the amount of indirect expenses charged to the award, and the amount of cash advances and payments made to sub recipients and contractors. C is your cash on hand and that will auto calculate for you and it would be your cash receipts minus your cash disbursements. Moving on to federal expenditures and unobligated balance. D is your total federal funds authorized or your total potential award. It is the total amount you are eligible to receive over all three tranches if your award is tranche based. E is your federal share of expenditures and exactly what constitutes an expenditure does vary if you are using a cash or accrual based system, so make sure to check that you are reporting correctly based on what type of accounting system you are using. F is federal share of unliquidated obligations, and for that one you should report obligations that have been incurred but that have otherwise not been paid or where an expenditure has not been recorded. And G total federal share is the sum of your federal share of expenditures, line E and the federal share of unliquidated obligations, line F. And as Terrie mentioned, your total federal share is what we will be using to determine eligibility for a disbursement review. And H is an unobligated balance of federal funds and this should auto calculate with your total federal funds authorized minus your total federal share. So moving further down this form for recipient share, we do not expect to see any formula TA grant recipients reporting anything here as there was no recipient shares for formula technical assistance. And for the disbursement review purposes, you can skip the program income section as disbursement review will not be looking at program income, but you should still be recording that for semi annual, but you do not have to report that here. And then for indirect expenses, you want to make sure to fill out the type, rate, period from, period to, base. amount charged, and federal share of any indirect expenses you are incurring. For item 12 remarks, While you can leave comments here, please do not attach any documents to this form. They will not come through with your portal submission. So if you do have anything to attach, such as the other narrative form, please make sure you do that in the portal. 13 is your certification. In here, you should be including the name, title, phone number, e-mail address of your authorized certifying official. And please make sure your Authorized Certifying Official signs the form. If you have any issues with signing the form, we recommend making sure to download the form to your computer instead of trying to fill it out online. That can help with a lot of those issues. So that is how to fill out the SF425 for disbursement review. We will move into the disbursement request narrative form. So as Terrie mentioned, this form goes over budget information as well as provides a space for you to give a narrative on project progress and contractual information. You can see here there are three tabs, the cover page, the budget request and the narrative. For the purposes of this demo, this is all test information, so this is not information of any jurisdiction, but we do want to flag that each recipient will receive a customized pre populated template with basic information including the applicant name, the award number, the grant period start and end dates, as well as your tranche amount. If you're requesting your second tranche, you will only see the tranche one amount and your total dispersed amount. There is nothing that you need to enter directly on this cover page. But you do want to check it at the end because you will see that items you enter elsewhere on this form will auto calculate on to this tab. So moving to the budget request, you will also see some pre populated information on this budget request. In this total budget, you can see the current budget that you have approved from Treasury across your tranches. If this information is not correct, please make sure to reach out to Treasury to get that information updated. And you should not see if you are in formula Technical Assistance award. You should not see anything for matching share. And when you are going to fill out a second tranche disbursement request, there is only one spot on this template that you need to edit. That is this Disbursement 1 section here. Everything else will be locked and you will not be able to enter information elsewhere, but you will see it auto calculate as you report expenditures. And something to note here is that you will see that this says cumulative expenditures to date. As Terrie mentioned, the only items you have to report on this form are your expenditures in these different categories. So let's say, for example, I have expended 10,000 for personnel, another 5,000 for fringe. Let's say I haven't expended anything for travel or for equipment or for supplies. Let's say I've expended funds for contractual. You can see that as I enter that information that it updates at this grand total here with the expenditures I have reported, but it also updates here with cumulative expenditures to date and the remaining budget. And if you go to the cover page, you will see your percentage update depending on the information you have reported here. And something to note on this slide is since this form only asks for expenditures, One, please do not report obligations on this form. But we understand that since you can use obligations to be eligible for additional funding, additional tranche funding, that you might not get up to this 80% Here. We will be looking at your SF 425 to determine eligibility. So you can continue to report as long as your total federal share on your SF 425 is at least 80% of your first tranche. This number will show up in red for you. And SSBCI may reach out for additional information if necessary to confirm data. But that is allowable. So then moving on to the last tab, the narrative. So this has two questions and two spots for you to give some information to the TA team about how your grant is progressing. So in this first box, it asks you to please describe how the project is progressing in accordance with the TA plan and the approved application. An ideal narrative would address progress towards achieving the performance goals established under the TA plan, including output measures and benchmarks. So here please give a brief explanation on how your how your TA project is progressing. If you have contractual costs or if you're sub awarding in this section, this is a great spot to let us know how that is progressing. So here this asks you that if the recipient is sub awarding or contracting portions of the award, please describe how funds are being used. An ideal narrative would include the burn rate in any output measures and benchmarks. So please give some information to the TA team. on contractual costs here and if contractual costs comprise your obligations and that's how you reached your disbursement threshold. This might also be a great spot to give the TA team some information on that just so they have a better picture of your contractual costs and how that all aligns with your expenditures and obligations. So that concludes going through the two disbursement templates. I am going to hand it back to Terrie Riley to show some more slides from the presentation. Terrie Riley: Thank you so much. So we're going to pick up with slides going back to your the data validation and the submission process. I'm sorry, compliance review. Thank you, Grace. So primarily, basically what we're doing here, in addition to reviewing your financial data, we're also looking at just overall compliance with our standards that are set forth in the award agreement, notice of agreement, our guidelines, reporting guidance, frequently asked questions, as well as any cost requirements, principles and audit requirements. You can find all these things on our website and you should have copies of your grant agreement. If you do not have any of this information that is currently printed on the screen, please let us know. It should be available on our website, but we can always provide copies to you as well. So once we have done this review and then we'll let your OM and the grant manager know of our findings and then we'll also conduct another review which is on the next slide, which is just a simple data validations. Could you go to the next slide, Grace? So as Lillian mentioned, some of the data validations is automatic and manual and primarily we're just looking to see that: Have you reached 80% threshold? Was the form SF 425 submitted correctly? Did we have any questions about those? As well as your disbursement request form, we're looking at as well. In addition, if you have a single audit meet, we may ask for the the most recent one and if there were any questions about that. We may also check with the capital compliance team if there were any concerns or anything that was brought up in their review that we may have questions about as well. But overall, if there are no errors or anything on the submission of the documents, then the request will be processed. So at this time we'll we'll pass it on to Ed and Ed will do a demo of the portal itself. But before that, I think he will address just the admin roles that are required to access the portal itself. Ed Hau: Good afternoon, everyone. Hope you're doing well. I'm going to post in the chat, just for everyone's benefit, the standard URL link for our applicant and reporting portal. So you should see that pop up in the chat window. And as my slide is readied here, I can just quickly go through the different account administration roles that we've set up for individuals who have permissions to access the portal. If for any reason you're struggling either accessing that URL or if your role permissions are not adequate based on your positions within your organization, please work through our Grants team or your Outreach Manager and our back office operations team will work with you. Generally speaking, for the Technical Assistance program, an account administrator or an authorized representative are the individuals with the most elevated permissions in the applicant portal. We also have read only access for a point of contact roles if it's someone that's a part of your team that just needs information, but not may not necessarily be involved in the disbursement request submission process. We have limited the permissions for doing uploading and editing to the authorized representative. The authorized official that is on a record for your respective award is the individual that will have to sign through our DocuSign process the submission of your formal disbursement request. And we'll demonstrate that here momentarily. I'm going to toggle over to the demonstration system next. You will land on this home screen and after the home screen, you will select the SSBCI program and information related to applications, reporting and requests for any of the SSBCI programs including technical assistance can be accessed through the left hand navigation screen. And you'll see as I click on the technical assistance disbursement request, in my case, I have a series of test accounts that I'm working with. So many of you will just see one individual record listed underneath your account and you can access that specific disbursement request through the edit and view function, which will then launch a series of tabs and sections for the disbursement request submission process, including the first tab which has instructions that Lily and Terry went through in the previous remarks. There will be a second tab for information related to your award and various contacts on your account. These can be edited and maintained as necessary through a self-service function which is provided in the instructions. And at any point in time, as you're navigating through these sections and tabs, be mindful of the widget, which is a small box up in the top right hand side of the navigation which will indicate where you are at at any point during the process. Red generally means incomplete and information is needed. Green generally denotes that the form is in some status of completion, or in this case it's already through the process pending a DocuSign review by the authorized official. The key tabs are Section 3 and Section 4, where the uploads of this 425 and the disbursement request form will take place. You will have upload features. This one does not display that because I I'm in a submit pending review pending DocuSign status, but the two uploads will be offered through the third section of the tab, and after those uploads have been successfully applied, you'll be taken to the certification and submission page, which also includes a series of instructions related to the DocuSign routing. The authorized official that will be notified in the e-mail address of the individual that is the authorized official and you, as the submitter, will enter your information into a a field that is at the bottom of the form prior to hitting submit. Once you submit that request, it will be DocuSign routed to the authorized official on file and it will be their responsibility to interact with DocuSign to hit the submit button and upon submission, Treasury will receive your submitted disbursement request. This navigation is very similar to the application process. So hopefully much of this is similar and familiar to many of you who have used the applicant portal. Lily, I'll transfer it back to you at this stage. Lilian Lowrey: That's good. Thank you, Ed. Just a quick note that some of you, I think we have 4 or 5 second tranche disbursements is currently in process and those are being processed manually. So if you already sent your documents to Treasury and you're in communication with one of us, you do not need to submit them through the portal. For anybody who would want to start on your request starting today, you would go through the portal to submit those requests. All right. Well, this concludes our presentation. We now have some time for questions, if you have any. There was one question on the chat that wasn't specific to the training, but it's something that we can talk about, and it asks if funds should be kept on separate accounts, you do need to follow to CFR 200. So if you receive a deposit from Treasury, a transfer of funds from Treasury do follow 2 CFR 200. Typically it is a lot easier. You keep funds in different accounts, so have one separate bank accounts for every single grant or every single award you do have. But there are ways that you can keep everything in one account if you have a very specific internal controls and you can keep track of what money is what and how much interest is being earned in each portion of those funds that are deposited. I see we have a question on the chat. Where can we find a recording for this presentation? So we actually have to take a little bit of time for internal team to review it and we will post it to our portal. So just where we were to submit the request. We will also be sharing with everybody that had accepted this meeting invite. So I have your e-mail address and I'll be sharing the recording and the PowerPoint as soon as it's cleared. All right, we have a question from Rita, New Mexico. Yes, we do have it. We are processing, as we stated early, we need about 45 days to review and go through all of the internal processes we have to go through. So we'll be in touch very soon, Rita, with specific information that we might need. And the floor is yours. Any questions you have about the dispersement process, please feel free to ask us. You can either come off mute or you can post your question on the chat. Terrie Riley: So Lillian, while we were waiting for questions, we did kind of want to review just some common tips for those submitting their disbursement request. And can you share your screen Anya so we can kind of go through the 425 or the disbursement request tab. So we could kind of highlight where we've seen just some things that we wanted to highlight for your awareness. I think primarily what we were looking at, in some cases, one of the things is a reporting date in the field #9, Here what we are asking you do there is just put in the date of your request. If you are submitting a new 425, put in the date of the request and Anya, correct me if I'm wrong in any of these statements as well, but that's what we like to see there. Yes, you could use your electronic digital signature for the 425 instead of the actual signature. And to that point, could you scroll down on the 425 as well? Because I think in this instance, we are asking that the authorized certifying official please sign off on this as well or an authorizing person be able to do that as well. The other thing that we've seen in some cases is that your obligations and I think that's 10, yes. And your obligations-- we've seen where the obligations have exceeded the amount that you've actually received, resulting in a negative unliquidated obligation. And so what we're asking you in this instance is that your obligations should match the actual receipt of the of your funds that you've received from us, meaning that it shouldn't exceed the amount of the disbursement that you received in that particular tranche. So that if you, we, as we mentioned, we know that in some cases you are making commitments maybe for incremental funding for your contractual obligations, but for the purpose of the 425, your obligation should not exceed the amount that you've received in your disbursement tranche. And I think Anya, we did have a question about the cash receipts. Could you refresh me on what that one was as well? Anya Sorensen: Yes. So I think something else that we have seen is for cash receipts that should equal a bit of we've seen a bit of confusion over what is cash receipts and what is cash disbursements. Cash receipts should equal any of the funding that you have received currently from Treasury. So if that is your first tranche and you if you are you requesting your second tranche that should equal your first tranche. If you were requesting a third tranche, that would equal your first and second tranches combined. So cash receipts is equal to the funds received from Treasury. Cash disbursements is any use, any disbursements that you have made whether it be for services, indirect charges, any goods or services. So that's like the funds colloquially that have been used of the grant. That has been the confusion that we've seen with that. Terrie Riley: And I do want to remind everyone that the 425 is cumulative. And I think the other thing that we mentioned as well, if you could scroll down in terms of the program income, you do not have to report that on your 425 for your disbursement request. Was there anything else that we wanted to highlight Anya? Anya Sorensen: Maybe one more thing would be there are two more items the recipient share. No TA formula grant recipient should be reporting any recipient share. And then so that's this section right here for recipient share. And then the last item I would have is the project or grant period dates. We do check those dates and if you have submitted an SF425 in the past for a semi annual report and if they the dates have been off by a few days or however long, you will have received communication from us about what your correct dates are. So please make sure to refer to the correct dates and make sure that you're reporting those accurately to the day on this form. Terrie Riley: So we'll open it up for questions again. But Brett, can you, did we answer your question? Were you asking in terms of a wet signature versus an electronic signature? OK, Thanks. Anya Sorensen: And if it does give you any trouble with the signature, downloading it to your computer instead of completing it in a browser typically helps with that. Lilian Lowrey: I would like to make a quick comment about the other form that we've reviewed, the disbursement request form. You probably saw it noticed throughout the form that said optional. That's for the use of the form itself. We do require the data that we're collecting in order to process your request. But the form as it's presented to you is optional at this time. And we are trying to obtain final clearance. And this is a very bureaucratic red tape process to obtain clearance on new forms. So we'll go through that and it will become a mandatory form. So at this time, the form itself is optional. We do require the data in order to process your request. All right. Any other questions? I have a question if that's okay. Of course. So we have a situation where looking at the SFR form, the lines E&F, we've reached more than 80%. But then, so that's including the obligated funds, but then looking at just dispersed funds, we're less than 80%. So we're not sure how to handle that situation. OK, I would say reach out to your outreach manager. We can schedule a quick meeting to go over the items. Or if you want to submit your SF 425 to us, we can take a look and make sure it does meet the criteria for the disbursement. And we're not hard limited on the 80%. We do have some discretion if you're getting close to it. So just let us know if your circumstances and we'll take a look into it. Thank you. All right. We have one more slide after this one. It's going to be our resources. So when you do receive the slides, but this is all in our website. So if you literally just Google SSBCI, Treasury, SSBCI, these resources will be available to you. We have the grant for policy guidelines, the reporting guidance. We do have an extensive FAQ document. You can find just CFR 200 just in your regular government website, and if you have any questions, we ask you to submit through that link right there. [email protected]. If it isn't answered by one of our team members in the Admin Ops team, they will forward it to us and we'll be glad to help. You can also contact your outreach manager. I want to thank everybody. This has been very productive. And again, we'll soon share the the recording and the presentation with you via e-mail and through our bulletin distribution system. All right. Thank you, everybody.