Facilities Inventory: Organized Research

Last updated: December 3, 2024
Content created: February 17, 2015

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The Facilities Information Group is currently working with the Cost and Capital Assets office in the Division of Financial Services to provide an updated method for documenting the research substantiation in rooms associated with organized research function codes 2.1 or 2.2.  We will share this method in the coming weeks with instructions and necessary links.  We will reach out to provide new training sessions in the beginning of the 2025 calendar year to ensure that everyone has what is needed to complete their inventory and reporting as required.

Best Practices for Reporting Organized Research

These best practices are based on recommendations from the Cornell University Cost and Capital Assets office in the Division of Financial Services.

Tracking Occupants

Develop a method to track faculty, staff and student space use.   

The process of identifying faculty, staff and student space use may require working with Human Resources, grant coordinators and lab managers to understand how space is used.

Visit the rooms and their occupants.

Consider space use over the full fiscal year from July 1st through June 30th so that it can be appropriately prorated.

Review the space at the end of each semester to catch appropriate changes.

Communication

Customize communications for each principal investigator, PI, and require verification of their space use.

Documentation

Keep accurate documentation for audit purposes. It is essential to keep backups of supporting documentation in an accessible location. Audits by a granting agency or by a federal cost reviewer will typically occur a few months to a few years after the conclusion of the inventory, so make sure others can access and understand your records.

Red Flags for Organized Research Reporting

The Cornell University Cost and Capital Assets office in the Division of Financial Services may review these scenarios to ensure proper coding of organized research space:

• Large sets of rooms (entire departments or multiple departments) coded with the same functional percentages.
• Program funding disproportional to assigned space.
• Large swings in organized research space between years.
• Spaces coded to 100% research.
• Room type inconsistent with use.  General use space such as meeting and conference rooms recorded as organized research space.
• Visiting scholars, when not paid by Cornell, coded to organized research.  Use function code 7.2, Outside Agencies.
• Spaces with undergraduate student occupants, unless exclusively paid by organized research funds, should typically have some portion of the rooms coded to instruction – i.e. labs.
• Organized research space where no funding exists.
• Organized research funding exists with no space coded to organized research.
• Buildings which have been constructed in the previous five years are likely to be audited since they contribute significantly to the indirect cost rate.

The existence of these scenarios does not mean that the space is improperly coded.  It merely indicates that the coding and associated documentation should be reviewed.

Room Use by Outside Agencies

If a space is occupied fully or partially by people compensated by an outside agency rather than Cornell University, for example, occupied by visitors including Federal visitors, some percentage of the function codes for the room should be function code 7.2 "Outside Agencies" even if the work that the visitors are performing in the room is research.