Pay Plan

What is the purpose?

The Pay Plan module helps Institutes and Centers and partner agency staff plan out a critical aspect in the grants cycle—the grant applications they are going to fund. The module is a management tool that eases the approval coordination for budget, program, and grants management communities as well as IC leadership, by streamlining and automating many of the pay plan authorization steps. Pay Plan supports this process through the following activities:

• Identifying grant applications for payment consideration
• Ensuring resolution of issues
• Determining and approving funding levels
• Capturing funding decisions

What are the features?

The Pay Plan module lets users:

• Define IC approval sets
• Search for grant applications to include in a pay plan
• Initiate payment authorization review of grant applications
• Facilitate grouping applications and review/authorize multiple grant applications
• View and track the funding approval process
• Identify and indicate resolution of issues
• Determine funding levels
• Capture co-funding decisions
• Document funding decisions

The module interfaces with other systems and automatically updates select information in IMPAC II. The IMPAC II fields of Intent to Pay, Council Recommendation Code, and Council Priority are updated. The Grant Folder is also updated with applicable approval and co-funding documents.

What are the benefits?

• Provides an organized way to search for grant applications to include into a pay plan
• Facilitates the grouping of applications, if desired, and their review and authorization for funding, thereby streamlining the approval process
• Supports both sequential and concurrent review/approval by authorizing groups within the IC, while still supporting official policy that the Chief Grants Management Officer (CGMO) must provide the final authorization and documentation in the Grant Folder
• Coordinates efforts for the approval process by offering a centralized module for all offices within an IC 
• Provides flexibility to examine and approve grant applications by leveraging grant application data available within the IMPAC II database

Who can use Pay Plan?

All IC and partner agency staff participating in the approval process can use the Pay Plan module. Some functionality leverages existing IMPAC II user roles and other functionality is designed for specific duties:

• All Pay Plan users can:
  • Search for grant applications and view grant details, including a full transaction history of approval actions taken for a given grant application
  • View approval sets
  • Manage pay plans and assign applications to a pay plan
  • Manage saved searches
• Grants management officials (existing IMPAC II role) can:
  • Perform all functions that the grants management specialists, budget officers, and program officials perform and also:
    • Perform IC Admin cuts
    • Accept/refuse co-funding
    • Review, provide feedback, and perform final approval (as a CGMO or GMO delegate for the CGMO) for payment of grant applications
    • With final approval, update Intent to Pay and Council Recommended codes
    • With final approval, create and store the Pay Memo in the Grant Folder
    • Stop payment on an application and remove a stopped payment
    • Revise authorization following final approval for updates to pay plan information
• Grants management specialists, budget officers, program officials and program analysts (existing IMPAC II roles) can:
  • Review, provide feedback, and indicate their approval for payment of grant applications (Program analysts cannot complete the Program approval)
  • Initiate out-of-order funding consideration
  • Identify and note resolution of issues
• Specialized Pay Plan roles exist to:
  • Manage approval sets
  • Review, provide feedback, and approve payment of grant applications for IC Directors, DEA Directors, Division Directors, and IC Special Coordinators
  • Initiate the review of grant applications (assign applications for approval)
  • Update specific grant financial information (including the updating of authorized years of an award and the AIDS percentages)