Financial Management
Develop a Financial Plan For Your Leave
The first step to developing a financial plan for your leave is to identify if your grants are managed through BMC Research and Sponsored Programs or BU Office of Sponsored Programs. You should also identify and meet with your departmental financial administrator for additional guidance.
General Considerations for Developing a Leave Financial Plan
- Identify administrative help & share your leave plan with them
- Establish “proxies” to help with financial decision making in your absence
- Develop clear directions and procedures for your research team to possibly enable them to help manage financial questions and decision making during your absence.
- Benefits for your leave (salary) are paid through a central account and sponsored (grants) and non-sponsored accounts are not charged during your paid family and medical leave (PFML). Please discuss this with your departmental grant/financial administrator. This is true for both BU and BUMG leaves.
If you have a trusted/more senior member of your research team they may be able to fill some of these roles. Alternatively, designating a co-investigator or a faculty colleague to be the “research financial question person on-call” may help your research team handle problems without your day-to-day input.
Administrative Financial Assistance
- Let your departmental financial administrators know that you are on a leave and share your expectations for financial management. For example, let them know if you have designated a senior member of your team or colleague to serve as your proxy during your absence.
- Discuss in what circumstances you want to be contacted in case if issues.
- Discuss the spending expectations that you established with your research team
- Discuss how your team will report vacation/sick and how this can be approved without your input
Establishing Research Team Financial Expectations
- Your research team should know in advance of your leave whom they should contact if they have issues related to their pay, needing to report sick or vacation time, or other payroll related issues.
- Establish clear guidelines on spending. For example, discuss with each research team member what amount of supplies & expenditure is OK without reaching out to you or your designated proxy. One strategy before your leave is to do a bit of inventory of lab supplies. Then discuss and potentially stock up as appropriate.
- Establish procedures for handling emergencies including broken equipment (such as ultralow/-80°C freezers) and ensure you have changed the emergency contact.
Checking on Expenses
- It is understandable that you may want to check on your research expenditures during your leave. This may include a monthly financial report from your departmental administrator.
- Alternatively for BU researchers, you may want to check in periodically yourself using the My Grants Website. Please note if you are connecting to My Grants Website from off campus you will need to use BU VPN.