SARAH WALTERS
Hi, and welcome to the Center for IDEA Fiscal Reporting Tool Demonstration on the IDEA Part C Fiscal Timeline. My name is Sarah Walters, and I have with me Laura Johnson. We are both TA liaisons for CIFR and we will be taking you on this journey today. To get started, I’m going to share a little bit of background information about the Part C Fiscal Timeline tool, and then Laura’s going to provide a demonstration. The IDEA Part C Fiscal Timeline helps state lead agency staff plan and monitor their Part C Fiscal activities to meet the IDEA Fiscal requirements.
With its detailed view of IDEA Fiscal activities at the state level, it can also help to train new staff. It provides a customizable overview of state-level IDEA Fiscal activities and links to resources. Within the tool is a schedule of activities. The timeline lays out a customizable schedule of activities across four topic areas: the IDEA Part C state grants, the use of funds (section III of the grant application), indirect costs (section IV.B. of the grant application), and the prohibition against supplanting, otherwise known as maintenance of effort.
There’s also an additional tab that you can use to record any fiscal processes specific to your state. The tool also includes symbols which indicate the type of work and the months in which the following occurs. Arrows represent ongoing work, which indicates work related to the activity that occurs during suggested months of the year. The circle indicates the end of the month for the state lead agency process. It’s the work related to the activity when it finishes during that month of the year.
The star equals the month in which the Department of Education due date is, and that indicates those months in which there is a federal deadline related to the activity. So that kind of wraps up some initial things to familiarize yourself within the tool before we get started. And now, I’m going to pass it to Laura, who’s going to provide us with a demonstration.
LAURA JOHNSON
Thank you, Sarah. Now I’m going to show you a demo of our IDEA Part C Fiscal Timeline. The first tab you see when you open it is our standard title page, along with disclaimers. The next tab is an acronym tab that has a lot of helpful acronyms that are used in the tool. This is a handy reference, especially for people who may be new to Part C Fiscal. The next tab is the heart of the tool, and this is the IDEA Fiscal Timeline.
Now, an important thing about this tab is that you should not edit it. You cannot edit it. It is locked. Everything is pulled from other tabs, and I’ll show you those in a second. So on this tab, you’ll see we have a year, and we start with the start of most fiscal years for states, which is July is the first date, and June is the last, and we have different symbols throughout the tool. An arrow means ongoing work, a dot is an end month for the lead agency process, and a star is a month with an ED due date. So those are hard and fast dates.
Now, if you want to take a look at what you’re doing in a particular month, you can use these drop-down filters and select all of those that are populated, and you can see what end dates, and due dates, and even ongoing dates you have. And for each of those items, it will show you the whole process. Now I want to show you about these items. So you see, we have the fiscal topic and the activity, and they’re color-coded to match the colors of the tabs they correspond to. So, here you see IDEA Part C state grants is a nice shade of purple, and down below the tab is a shade of purple as well.
Now, in this column, the fiscal topic column, these are all links. So if you click on one of these, it will take you directly to the IDEA Part C state grants tab. And then if you want to go back to the fiscal timeline tab, you can do that… you click here, or you can click at the bottom. Click here to return to the timeline. And this makes it handy to navigate the tool, especially as you’re working with tabs that are farther down the line. So let’s look at this state grants tab and all of our tabs for the topics look identical, except for the information inside will be specific to that tab.
So the first column is the activity, and this should be a short description because you want it to fit easily on the fiscal timeline tab. The second column is for any federal citations, and the third is for additional information. And this is where you can get more detailed about the activity. And then we also have a column over here for LA information, which is entirely optional. And here you can include information such as who might be responsible, where files are saved, other things like that.
I do want to note that this file comes pre-populated with the text you see here, but you can edit or change anything. You can add rows. Don’t recommend deleting something unless your process really does not include that step. Then you have the dates. You have four columns for dates. The first is the ongoing work start. The second is the ongoing work end. The third is the end month for the lead agency process, and that is the month recommended by the TA center. And then finally, we have a month with the Department of Education due date.
And those are generally hard and fast dates. And for any of these to select the month or change it, you just go to this drop-down in the bottom right corner and select the month that you want to use. We have the months preloaded, so you don’t accidentally misspell something and blow up the tool. Now, let’s say you do want to add an item to the list. To do that, I’m going to scroll down a little bit. To do that, what you need to do, because it’s very important that you not use CTRL X or cut in the tool as it will break some formulas.
So I’m going to select all of this and hit CTRL C for copy. And then I’m just going to move my cursor down one row and hit CTRL V for paste. And you’ll see now I have a duplicate row, but I can write over that because this is where my new activity is going to go. And if we go back to the fiscal timeline tab, we’ll see that we’ve added a new activity. At the bottom of each topical tab, we have a table with resources, which includes the name of the resource, a description of the resource, and then a link to the resource.
These links were current as of the publication of the tool, but they may change over time, especially anything at the ED.gov site or at other TA centers. This tool also comes with a good instructions document in a PDF form. And this instructions document will walk you through the structure of the tool, how each tab functions, and the basic motivation behind creating the tool and the use of the tool. We recommend that you print this out and have it available with you as you’re working on the timeline. And I think that’s it for the demo, and I will turn it back to Sarah.
SARAH WALTERS
Thanks, Laura. If you have any further questions, you can contact us through our website at cifr.wested.org or by email at [email protected].
