This track focuses on key components of understanding allowable costs, maintaining accurate effort reporting, and preparing for audits. It also addresses facilities and administrative (F&A) considerations and the full project closeout process to ensure compliance and proper completion of financial responsibilities.

This track covers essential areas of oversight such as IRB and IACUC requirements, conflict of interest management, and export controls. It also includes guidance on subrecipient monitoring, as well as processes related to rebudgeting and carryover to ensure ongoing compliance throughout the life of a project.

This track highlights core aspects of working with clinical trials and industry collaborators. It emphasizes the contracting process, maintaining billing compliance, and managing data sharing requirements that support successful and compliant research partnerships.

This track provides an opportunity to engage current and future leaders of finance in training and conversations about managing diverse teams of grant accountants, A/R specialists, IT groups, and costing experts. Sessions could include professional development of leadership skills, strategies, and approaches to change management, strategic planning, and project management. Additionally, leadership sessions on organizational structures, managing complex personality types, management, and leadership styles, building team cohesion, crisis management, and mentoring may be of interest to this group of professionals.

This track is focused on building skills for department administrators who work directly with Principal Investigators and research teams. Sessions within this track should help early-career DAs develop foundational principles such as allowability, allocability, and consistency when making charges to sponsored projects, understanding Uniform Guidance, allocating and managing effort, differences between managing fixed-price and cost-reimbursable awards, portfolio management, sub-recipient monitoring, managing specific funding mechanisms (i.e., career development awards, fellowships, cooperative agreements, training grants, etc.), and residual balance transfers. Intermediate and advanced topics in this area could be focused on emerging hot topics, inter-departmental collaboration, financial reporting, effort reporting, institutional base salaries, data management and shadow systems, and managing cost transfers.

This track is designed to cover all non-financial activities related to sponsored projects from the period immediately after an award has been received through final sponsor reporting. Early career professionals would benefit from sessions on topics including budget set-up, regulatory compliance, managing financial conflict of interest, effort reporting, sponsor prior authorizations (regulations and requests), preparing and submitting progress reports, and final scientific and invention reporting. Advanced sessions could take deeper dives into these areas and also explore nuances within these areas by focusing on specific sponsor and award mechanisms.

This track should consist of sessions and panel discussions to provide advanced training and stimulate conversation on complex, pressing challenges facing finance specialists and senior financial leaders. Topic areas may include managing F&A and fringe benefit rate development and negotiations, managing A/R, ERP system implementations, and upgrades, and creating, managing, and refining chart of accounts, financial close-out projects, data migration for new and upgraded IT systems, service center rate development and maintenance, policy and procedure development, collaborating with Central finance, and petty cash management.

The curriculum for each program includes required workshop(s), four (4) to eight (8) required sessions and one (1) to six (6) elective sessions.

Certificate program course credit is earned and awarded only if full SRAI membership is in effect at the time the course is taken. In other words, only full members may receive credit for taking Certificate program workshops and sessions. Chapter members, non-members and those with lapsed membership will not receive educational credit for any Certificate program sessions or workshops taken during this time.

SRAI members have up to three years to complete the courses from a specific Certificate program requirement, allowing you greater flexibility to manage time, travel and budget constraints.