Grants & Finance
Architecture and implementation grounded in financial operations.
Award setup affects billing. Project and contract structures affect reporting. Conversion decisions affect reconciliation and closeout. I help institutions connect these decisions across Oracle Cloud Financials and Grants, bringing together system design, practical accounting and the needs of finance and research administration.
My work draws on Oracle Cloud, PeopleSoft and sponsored research finance experience. I can support a full implementation, a functional workstream or a targeted data-quality and process challenge.
When to bring me in
You are starting a new ERP initiative and want finance and grants expertise from discovery and requirements through architecture, design and implementation.
You are planning award, project, contract or chart-of-accounts structures and want them aligned with operational, reporting and control needs from the outset.
You are preparing a conversion strategy, or converted data in an active implementation needs validation, reconciliation or cleanup.
Your current system has manual billing, fragmented workflows or unclear handoffs that need practical improvements.
You want to establish shared procedures, controls and role-based training before go-live, or strengthen them during stabilization.
Relevant project experience
Before moving into consulting, I worked in grant accounting and research administration, giving me firsthand experience with the financial operations behind sponsored research. I bring that foundation to finance and grants architecture, 8+ full-lifecycle ERP implementations, data conversion and reconciliation for universities and academic medical centers. The projects below illustrate selected parts of that broader experience.
Public university | Oracle Cloud finance architecture
I served as Finance Architect and Functional Lead across General Ledger, Grants, Projects, procure-to-pay, Fixed Assets, Budgeting and EPM. The work included solution design, process transformation, configuration, conversion, testing, workflow and cross-functional integration.
Multi-campus university system | Converted award reconciliation
I led a team of accountants supporting reconciliation and cleanup across more than 3,000 converted awards. We connected grants data with expenditures, invoices, reimbursements, accounts receivable and general ledger balances. Targeted queries and exception reports supported root-cause analysis and improvements to reconciliation, award setup, billing and closeout.
These examples describe prior work. Client identities are withheld to protect confidentiality.
How I approach the work
1. Understand the lifecycle. Document current and future-state business processes, including handoffs, owners, approvals and controls. Bring research administration, central finance, departments and IT into early design discussions so requirements reflect the full sponsored-project lifecycle.
2. Design connected operations. Align chart-of-accounts, award, project and contract structures with institutional requirements. Map integrations with pre-award and effort certification systems and processes, including award intake, labor distribution, effort reporting and the ownership of data exchanged between teams. Consider salary caps, indirect costs, cost sharing, billing and closeout alongside configuration decisions.
3. Validate across modules. Treat clean conversion data as an early implementation-planning workstream, not a task left to cutover. Identify data owners, profile and cleanse legacy records, agree conversion scope and reconciliation rules, and plan multiple validation cycles. Test representative awards and transactions across modules, reconciling balances and resolving exceptions before operational handoff.
4. Equip the operating team. Turn approved process maps and design decisions into SOPs, knowledge-base content, job aids and role-based training. Practice real grant accounting scenarios and establish ownership for exception monitoring, support and future cloud-update testing.
A campuswide change, not an isolated grants module
A new grant accounting system can affect nearly every Oracle module and functional area. Procurement and Payables feed sponsored-project costs; HR, payroll and effort processes shape labor charging; assets, receivables, billing and the general ledger depend on consistent award and project information. I help teams map those dependencies and test end-to-end scenarios with the people who will operate the processes.
That means validating more than whether an interface runs: the right data must arrive, reconcile, support reporting and reach an accountable owner when something fails.
What an engagement can include
Documented current and future-state process maps, handoffs, controls and functional design decisions.
Chart-of-accounts and award/project structure recommendations.
An early conversion data-quality plan, reconciliation tools and exception logs.
Pre-award and effort-certification integration requirements, cross-module test scenarios and control checks.
Operating procedures, role-based job aids and reporting measures.
Priorities and success measures are agreed with your leadership team and refined as the underlying evidence becomes clear.
Build around the way your institution works
Let’s discuss the system change, process challenge or reconciliation issue that needs a practical path forward.