Narrative for Space Training Session

Opening Remarks

Thanks for coming. Some of you have traveled from the other campuses and I appreciate your attendance. We have a lot of material cover today.

This is Wendy Salisbury and Dick Carterud. I’m Wesley Eaton. Wendy comes from Inventory and Dick is retired now but formerly was the director of the old Grants and Contracts

We’re located in the Budds building, room 114 and part of the Controller’s Division.

Today we want to cover what you’ll need to help complete and update the University’s space inventory and functional usage study. But first lets go over some preliminaries.

Training Session - Preliminaries

We asked departments to assign a space administrator and it looks like you got volunteered. You will be our contact and we will be there when you have questions and need help.

We will be delivering detailed room and survey material to you shortly but for today you should have instructional materials, which we’ll be going through in a minute.

In your material today, we’ve included an excerpt from William Kirkland’s publication on Fixed Assets. Also you’ll find a PowerPoint presentation originated by KPMG, and a copy of the space package you’ll be receiving during the next month.

Today we’ll spend our time going through these materials. As we proceed you are invited to follow along. All this material can be found on our web sight.

Examples

I want to start out by saying that the University needs to continue to build and update our existing space data file.

This file has many uses. Planning for current and future space needs for classroom, labs and office space is certainly right on top of the list of priorities.

Space usage is also used in developing our indirect cost proposal. Space usage assignment to … lets say instruction or organized research… is the how facility costs are distributed to benefiting functions.

Just so we’re all on par with what facility costs are, let me give you a couple of examples. Some of these costs are the fuel costs, or a room’s equipment depreciation or the overall building’s depreciation. In certain cases, interest costs on funds used to construct facilities can be included as part of facility costs.

Remember that the University can be reimbursed for these facility costs. These costs become part of our indirect cost rate that in applied to externally sponsored programs.

One important reason we need to conduct a survey is because the rules have changed as to how space is functionalized.

We used to be able to ask, "what’s the predominant use" of the room. We only needed to make this one determination. Our current space file reflects this "predominant" approach. Today, we need to determine the more comprehensive view of how a room is being used.

Examples...continued

First example.

Let me start with an analogy. The rooms in your house are used for sleeping, eating, cooking, watching TV, whatever. This is room usage. Sometimes these activities (usage) are conducted in separate rooms, while some rooms have multiple uses. People frequently watch TV and eat in the same room for example. It can get complicated.

At UCONN, you will be following the functional usage definitions provided in your package. You must become familiar with these definitions. We’ll go over them in a minute.

Here’s another example.

We have Professor Jones. His department account is FRS 250xxx fc 11 (INST). He has both University Research from our Research Council FRS 4411xx fc 22 (OR), and Sponsored Research FRS 521XXX fc 22 (OR). You will notice both of these activities are organized research. (Organized Research can also be found in ledger 6 accounts.) Professor Jones also has an I/C return account. An I/C return account supports his Department Research (DR) effort for which he is paid out of his department account FRS 250xxx. (Remember, department research is run out of the department’s account.) Professor Jones attends faculty meetings. This effort is Department Administration (DA) and it also is part of FRS 250xxx.

You conduct an interview with Professor Jones because you determine that he is the room occupant of the room in question. You determine that this faculty is conducting sponsored research (OR) on FRS 521XXX and University Research (OR) on FRS 4411XX. Also the federal grant pays for 1 graduate student. Jones also indicates he uses the room for his departmental research and has another graduate student to help him with this research.

This research lab could be functionalized as 80% (OR), 10% (DR) and 10% (INST). The percentages need to add to 100%.

When more than one person uses the room, you go through the same process and develop an overall composite room usage by function. Remember this is your best determination. There’s no formula to make this determination except for the intensity of the use.

Let’s continue. Faculty Jones has an office. (They all do.) Generally faculty office space follows their overall effort distribution. In our example Professor Jones’ office might be functionalized as 70% (INST), 20% (OR), 5% (DA) and 5%(DR).

Examples...continued

Office space should carry something from all his activities. This is what is expected for faculty office space.

Some of you are from non-academic departments. Non-academic departments can be somewhat easier to finish because of the single function nature of the activity conducted in these departments.

Examples of single function departments include:

Lib – Library (not department libraries)

GA - University wide administrative departments such as Purchasing, Payroll, Human Resources,

OM - Facilities,

OSP - Office for Sponsored Programs.

The entire space area for these departments will be marked with just one of these definitions. Some might think that employee training in these cases should be marked as instruction. No, this training is not connected to student educational mission and is part of the department mission.

Special Items

We’ve had several new buildings and many departments have moved around this year. I can think of Central Warehouse, Purchasing, Accounts Payable, Mail Services, Direct Mail, Travel and several academic units to name a few. Space usage forms will have to be completed for the old space and possibly by different departments. Space can only be marked as vacant if it is unoccupied…. out of use… for more than 12 months.

And don’t forget to keep the Inventory Department updated when equipment is moved around. If you don’t the space and equipment inventory files could indicate different using departments.

We need to touch on service centers (SC). There are University wide centers and academic department service centers. The space where this activity is conducted in needs to be identified and separated from instructional and organized research. The predominant methodology no longer can be applied.

Examples of University wide service centers are our Mail Services, Central Stores, and Facilities. Examples of academic department centers include Animal Care, Booth Research Center, Institutes of Material Science, Environmental Research Institute, to name a few.

Closing narrative

If you’re having difficulties at any point in this process, OCA is available to help you. (Remember, there are only 3 of us! This is a low budget operation.)

Lets spend a moment looking at an extract from William Kirkland, Fixed Assets Accounting at Research Institutions. Then we’ll follow the PowerPoint presentation and go over the sample space package.