Incoming agreements guidance (SOM/SON)

Pre-Award Stage

The Office of Research Administration is responsible for the pre-award review of applications submitted to foundations, state agencies, and when Duke is acting as a subrecipient under a Federal grant. 

  • An Sponsored Project System (SPS) record will need to be created, completed and routed to Pending Central Approval (PCA) state in accordance with the Office of Research Administration’s 5 business day review guideline. All required documents for the  application will need to be attached within the SPS record Internal Documentation section. If application will require an earlier deadline to accommodate a Prime organization's internal deadline, please adjust the ORA review timeline calculation to accept the Prime's deadline and indicate in the SPS Proposal Memo the complete deadline date information.
  • ORA will complete the review of the application and will notify department when application is ready for submission.
  • For an SBIR/STTR application, please follow the SBIR/STTR Implementation Procedure

 

Award Activation Stage

  • The SPS record must be in “Submitted” state for an agreement to be actioned.
  • Please send all agreements or amendments to contracts.management@mc.duke.edu for action.  Agreements uploaded in SPS or sent to any other email address may not get actioned. Please note any due date for signature from the sponsor when you send the agreement to us and in SPS Proposal Memo. 
  • Once the agreement is received, the department will receive a copy of the agreement (if it came from an external entity) and will be notified who the agreement manager will be for your project.  The department will be asked to confirm the budget and statement of work for all agreements.
  • Once the department has confirmed the budget and SOW, the agreement manager will negotiate the terms and conditions with the prime organization. When the negotiations have reached mutual consent between both parties, we will provide an Authorized Official signature and will return the Partially Executed (PE) agreement to the prime organization. The prime organization then returns a Fully Executed (FE) agreement which will activate the award. At this activation stage, ORA will send the award documents to the Treasury and Billing Services (TBS) with a request to establish a WBS Element/fund code, if a pre-award code was not requested. When TBS has set up a WBS Element/fund code, costs may be encumbered and invoiced for payment on the project.  If the department is spending at-risk during the negotiation phase, we recommend that you establish a pre-award code to avoid late cost transfer issues.  

 

Managing the award

  • Any modifications to the terms of the agreement, including extension of the end date, generally require an amendment to the original agreement.  To submit a request for a modification to the sponsor, please submit an Admin Action Request form.  Once a modification arrives, please route to contracts.management@mc.duke.edu as outlined above.