PennERS

The PennERS (Effort Reporting System) project is an initiative sponsored by the Vice Provost for Research, the Division of Finance, the School of Medicine, and Information Systems & Computing. The project is designed to increase awareness of the regulatory requirements and provide better technological tools to meet the effort reporting needs of Penn’s research community. The goals of PennERS are:

To provide the research and administrative communities enhanced tools to develop, manage, maintain, and report effort at the University of Pennsylvania
To provide education and training for research personnel related to the general requirements for effort reporting
To develop and provide a secure infrastructure, standard processes, and tools that will allow research faculty, staff, and administrators:
- To reduce the administrative burden of effort reporting
- To reduce the number of retroactive payroll adjustments resulting from the effort reporting process
- To provide more accurate and timely effort reports as required by the federal government

Components

The PennERS project is composed of three primary components, as well as an Educational Initiative:

Salary Distribution/Salary Planning
- Real-time web access to current payroll job distributions to establish, review, and modify salary distributions
- Can be used as a tool to help facilitate future salary planning
Effort Certification
- Web-based application for reviewing, adjusting, and certifying effort on sponsored projects
- Will be able to generate cost transfers (reallocations)
- Allows for home organization Business Administrator (BA) to assign another qualified BA to review effort reports for an individual in their home organization
Tool(s) to assist certifiers in better understanding the effort report in order to accurately certify effort
Educational Initiative
- Commenced in the fall of FY03, provides the necessary education to both Faculty and Business Administrators regarding the requirements of effort reporting and its certification