Hello all! I'm hoping that someone might have had experience with this and be willing to reach out to me off-list so that I can pick their brains a bit.

Like most places, we use percent effort on our grants. We've had contracts here and there that required more precise tracking of billable days or hours, but never a lot and the person who managed that previously always just did it by email. Now that it's on my plate and we're dealing with more of those contracts, especially looking down the road, I would love to switch to something automated that will collect information by person and by project on a monthly basis and do the appropriate follow-up to make sure that the information is submitted in a timely manner.

Some of the obvious solutions are a non-starter for a variety of reasons - most time tracking software is active tracking to the minute, which is way more than I'd ever need or want to inflict on someone, and then on the other end something like a simple survey in Microsoft or Google Forms doesn't work as well if someone wants to submit partial information but needs to be reminded to complete the rest later.

Right now I'm going with pre-scheduled emails in Outlook, but that doesn't do the follow-up if someone is non-responsive and that's the mental load I'd like to eliminate as the number of projects we're handling like this expands.

If anyone has a great solution to this at a department level, please let me know!

Katie Walker | Associate Director, Finance & Administration | Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation
Boston University | College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College
xxxxxx@bu.edu  |  cpr.bu.edu  | 940 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215