ezFedGrants Internal Portal Claim Creation and Payment · ezFedGrants Internal Portal Claim Creation and Payment Job Aid Internal Portal Claim Creation and Payment 14/24 3/3/2017

ezFedGrants Internal Portal Claim Creation and Payment

Job Aid

Internal Portal Claim Creation and Payment 1/24 3/3/2017

Purpose

This job aid provides details on creating, processing and paying manually-submitted claims in the ezFedGrants Internal Portal.

There are two general types of claims you will encounter:

Advance Payment Requests: The recipient is requesting funds be disbursed in advance of having incurred any actual expenses. The recipient must provide a justification narrative for all advance payment requests.

o The ezFedGrants External Portal does not currently support submission of justification narratives. Therefore, depending on your agency-specific procedures, advance payment requests must be submitted and processed manually, or through the ASAP system.

Reimbursements: These are standards claims in which the recipient has incurred an expense and is requesting reimbursement for these expenses. The recipient must provide a detailed budget breakdown for all manually-submitted claims.

The Procedure section of this document has been divided into the following subsections:

Creating a Claim

Claims Workflow

Advance Payment Justifications

Trigger

Perform this procedure when a recipient or cooperator has emailed their SF-270/payment request to your agency. Please refer to the ezFedGrants External Portal Claim Acceptance and Payment Job Aid if the recipient or cooperator has submitted their SF-270/payment request through the ezFedGrants External Portal.

Prerequisites

Access to FMMI Portal & the ezFedGrants Internal Portal with the appropriate role for creating, approving, and/or paying claims.

In order to create or approve claims for agreements under a particular program, all involved agency users must have been designated as partners for that program.

The agreement against which the claim has been submitted must be in Active status.

In order to successfully pay a new claim, all prior claims for the same agreement must have been fully approved and paid.

In order to successfully pay a new claim, there must not be any open performance or financial reports for the agreement the new claim is being submitted against.

A detailed budget breakdown for the claim, as provided by the recipient.

For all advance payment requests except the first: The recipient must provide a justification narrative in reference to the prior advance payment request.


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Menu Path

Use the following menu path to begin this procedure:

FMMI Portal > Grantor Management > Grants and Agreement Management > Grants and Agreement Management System

Helpful Hints

On certain screens you may need to scroll to view additional data fields.

This job aid covers the Enterprise-level procedure for manually processing claims. Please consult your agency- or office-specific reference materials, as the workflows and computer systems your agency or office uses for processing claims may vary from the instruction provided in this document.

Have a copy of the SF-270 and the detailed budget breakdown for the claim available while completing this procedure.

The recipient must provide a justification narrative for all advance payment requests after those request have been paid. Therefore, in order to process any new claims or advance payment requests, the justification narrative for the previous advance payment request must have been submitted.

o If the final claim for an agreement is an advance payment request, the recipient must still provide a justification narrative for that advance payment request in order to closeout the agreement.

Certain screenshots may display only a portion of the screen. Note that when working within a system, only the center body of the screen will change. The navigation options along the left side of the screen and the header bar across the top of the screen will remain the same.

Note: Data used in this procedure is a representative sample for the purpose of training. Actual data in the system may vary based on agency and scenario.


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Procedure

Creating a Claim

This section describes how to generally create a claim in the ezFedGrants Internal Portal. Depending on your agency or office, additional fields, attachments, or other actions may be required beyond those described in this procedure.

1. Start the procedure by accessing the ezFedGrants Internal Portal Home screen.

2. Click the Claims tile and click the Create Claim link from the dropdown menu.


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3. First, you must locate the agreement against which the claim is being made. On the Search: Agreements to Claim screen, enter the relevant/known information into the available search fields, and then click the Search button.

Note: The Status field displays the Active option by default, since claims can only be created for agreements in Active status. Further, the ASAP Account ID field is only applicable for agencies using the Automated Standard Application for Payments (ASAP) system for advance payments.

4. When you have located the relevant agreement in the Result List table, click the Create Claim link in the Create Claim column.


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5. On the Claim: New screen, complete the necessary fields in the Claim Overview section. Most fields will populate based on the information on the agreement. However, depending on your agency or the types of claims allowed on the agreement, you may need to complete additional items, such as:

Indicating if the claim is a reimbursement or advance payment

Indicating if this is the final claim for the agreement

Providing payee contact information

Indicating total funds requested for the claim

Once you have completed any additional Claim Overview fields, locate the Period Covered By This Request subsection (within the Claim Overview section) and click the icon in the Valid From field.

6. From the Valid From dropdown calendar, click the date that corresponds to the beginning of the period for which the recipient is requesting payment.


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7. Click the icon in the Valid To field.

8. In the Valid To dropdown calendar, click the date that corresponds to the end of the period for which the recipient is requesting payment.


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9. Click the Edit List button in the Item List section.


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10. Click in the Direct Expense field(s) to enter the direct expense information for which the recipient is requesting payment.

If there is an indirect expense rate for a particular line item, the system will automatically calculate the indirect expense(s) and populate the Indirect Expense fields after saving the claim. Depending on your agency and/or permissions, you may be able to manually edit the Indirect Expense fields as well.

Note: Agreements allowing both advance payments and reimbursements may have some budget categories with two line items: one for reimbursements and one for advance payments. Unless informed by your agency or office, recipients will not be aware of these duplicate line items.

For budget categories with two line items: If the recipient is requesting more than is included in either the reimbursement or advance payment line item, the funds will need to be redistrubuted between the two line items in order to process the claim. In this case you will need to amend the agreement and then process the claim once the amendment is finalized.

For example: An agreement has a total budget of $10,000 for Travel, and allows both reimbursements and advance payments for Travel expenses. The budget for this agreement has a line item for Travel (advance payments) and Travel (reimbursements), with $5,000 allocated to each line item. The recipient submits a claim requesting $7,000 reimbursement for Travel expenses. In order to process the claim, you must amend the agreement and move $2,000 from the Travel (advance payments) line item to the Travel (reimbursements) line item.


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11. Scroll down to the Attachments section, and click the Attachment button to add any required

attachments (for example, a SF-270).

12. Within the Attachment popup window, click the Type field.


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13. Click the appropriate attachment type from the Type dropdown menu.

Note: The option selected in the Type field will alter the options provided in the Title field.

14. Click the Title field.


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15. Select the appropriate attachment title from the Title dropdown menu.

Note: The option selected in the Type field will determine the options available in the Title field.

16. Click on the icon in the Date Received field.


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17. In the Date Received dropdown calendar, click the date on which the document was received.

18. Click the Browse button in the Upload Document From Local Hard Disk field to locate and select the attachment document on your computer.


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19. Once you have located and selected the appropriate file, click the Attach button.

20. On the Claim: New screen, scroll up to the Claim Overview section, and click the Status field.


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21. From the Status dropdown menu, click the Valid option to process the claim and move the claim along the claims workflow. The Invalid option will effectively cancel the claim.

Note: If you are not ready to submit the claim for approval, leave the claim in Draft status and simply click the Save button.

22. Click the Save button. The claim will now be routed along the claims approval workflow.

Note: To exit a claim without saving, click the Cancel button.


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The Claims Workflow

This section describes how to take action on a claim that has been sent for your review. This section does not describe how to review the details of a claim for accuracy. Please refer to your agency-specific materials for instructions on reviewing claims before approving a claim.

1. To move a claim along the claims workflow, click the Worklist tile from any screen in the ezFedGrants Internal Portal.

Note: Recent worklist items may also be accessed quickly from the Workflow Tasks work center on the ezFedGrants Internal Portal Home screen.


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2. From the Worklist screen, locate the claim you wish to continue processing, and click the link in the Subject column for that claim.

Note: Clicking the title cell of the Subject column will open a subject search, which allows you to search your entire worklist by subject.

3. On the Workflow Task: Action Required: Review Claim screen, review the information about the claim in the Description section, then click the Decision field.

Note: To view more detailed information about the claim, you will need to view the claim itself. Note the claim ID, then click the Claims tile on the left-hand navigational menu, and click the Search Claims link. On the Search: Claims screen, search using the ID of the claim you would like to view.


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4. If you are satisfied with the claim, click the Approve option from the Decision dropdown menu to pay the claim.

Note: The Return option will return the claim to the creator for editing. The Cancel option will cancel the claim.

5. Click the Execute Decision button to finalize your decision.


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6. On the Worklist screen, click the Expand Message Area arrow for a confirmation message that the claim has been paid.

Note: Depending on your agency workflow strucutre, the system may require you to repeat the review process more than once for the same claim. Please check your worklist to ensure the claim does not require multiple approvals.


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7. Once the approval workflow is complete, the claim’s status will update to Paid or Approved by Program Manager on the Claim screen, and an invoice will be created in the FMMI Financials System.

You may access the Claim screen by clicking the Claims tile on the left-hand navigiation menu, and clicking the Search Claims link.

8. On occasion an error may occur in which the ezFedGrants System does not trigger the series of complementary actions in FMMI which lead to payment disbursement. Unfortunately, the system will not generate any alert about this error, and this will only come to the fore when the recipient contacts you in regard to missing payment.

However, you can check if a payment has been triggered by accessing the Claim screen and reviewing the details in the Treasury Confirmation and Transaction History sections. If the payment actions have been triggered correctly, in the Transaction column you should see two long, alphanumeric ID numbers ending with OI and CI, as indicated in the below screenshot. If a payment has been disbursed, a value will be displayed in the Treasury Confirmation section (not pictured).

If you believe the system has not triggered the payment correctly, please submit a ServiceNow ticket in order to correct this issue.


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Advance Payment Justifications

All advance payment requests require the recipient to submit a justification narrative after the payment has been disbursed. Any outstanding justifications must be submitted before any new claims can be paid or the agreement can be closed.

This section describes how to add a justification to a claim in the ezFedGrants Internal Portal once received from the recipient.

1. To begin the procedure access the ezFedGrants Internal Portal Home screen, click the Claims tile on the left-hand navigation menu, and click the Create Claim/Justification link.

2. On the Search: Claim Form screen, search for the claim associated with the justification.


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3. In the Result List table, locate the relevant claim and click the Create Justification link in the Create Justification column.

4. On the Justification: New screen, click the Edit button in the Justification Overview section.

5. Locate the Attachments section and click the Attachment button to add a new attachment. In this case you will be attaching the justification narrative.


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6. The Attachment popup window will open. Upload the justification document similarly to how you attached the SF-270 when creating the claim:

Type: Justification

Title: Justification

Date Received: Date received from recipient

Other Attachment Title and Relevant Attachment Sequential Letter: If necessary

Click the Browse button to locate the justification narrative document on your computer. Click Attach once you’ve provided all the details of the document and located the document on your computer.

7. Once you’ve attached the Justification document, click the Status field in the Justification Overview section of the Claim screen. Select the Valid option from the dropdown menu.


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8. Click the Save button. The justification will now proceed through the claim approval workflow as normal, except that no payment will be trigged once the approval is finalized.


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Comments

Additional Information

Refer to the following additional materials:

ezFedGrants Agreement Creation Job Aid

ezFedGrants Amendment Creation Job Aid

ezFedGrants External Portal Claim Acceptance and Payment Job Aid

ezFedGrants Program Creation Job Aid

Version Control

Name Date Changes Made

April Murphy Prior to 2/20/2017

Initial Document Created

April Murphy 2/27/2017 Generally clarified information throughout. Added details about advance payments in Purpose and Procedure sections. Added step 8 of Claim Workflow subsection. Updated referenced document titles throughout Added Version Control table Updated Header and Footer formatting Divided Purpose Section into multiple subsections. Added entire Justification subsection. Improved 508 alt text and descriptions

April Murphy 3/3/2017 Added bookmarks for 508 compliance

Documents

ezFedGrants Internal Portal Claim Creation and Payment · ezFedGrants Internal Portal Claim Creation and Payment Job Aid Internal Portal Claim Creation and Payment 14/24 3/3/2017