As many of you are aware, we’ve been hard at work refactoring the InfoEd budget tool for many months. The new budget will be on display in various sessions and a workshop at this year’s User Group Meeting – Share the Knowledge.
The key goals for the budget project are to improve usability and reduce complexity, while retaining – and expanding – the incredible budget flexibility and functionality that helped make InfoEd’s proposal development and proposal tracking modules industry standards.
A significant milestone toward releasing the budget, we recently completed a review of the budget functionality with several clients. Users at those institutions worked with the new budget and gave us fantastic feedback to make further improvements.
Investigators and other occasional users with limited training will easily grasp working with InfoEd’s new budget interface. WorkFlow security is available for each page of the budget and the personnel page. Investigators can be granted access to just a single screen from which they can view, record and update all the direct costs for a proposal. Full budget details can be exported in Excel or as a PDF. Access to detailed cost sharing, F&A nuances, managing budget versions and date shifting is available, but can be reserved for those with more training.
Flexibility is a hallmark of InfoEd’s budget, supporting entry of very simple one-line budgets for total direct costs or building complex budgets based on discrete costs for individual components.
Of course full support continues for building budgets for submission to Grants.gov including NIH modular budgets and SF424RR regular and Fed/non-Fed detailed budgets. And, the infrastructure is in place to fully support submitting complex applications to NIH when that becomes available later this year.
The new budget will be on full display at InfoEd Global’s upcoming User Group Meeting 2012. There is still one week remaining to register.