The Award Count shows how many awards have received funding in a specific period. Award Dollars shows the respective sponsor funding authority received. The Monthly View of Awards shows the funding increments.
While the methodology of using actuals (sponsor authority received) has remained consistent from FY12 through present, there has been variability in the rules used for assigning awards to a specified fiscal year.
- Between FY12-FY16: awards were mostly assigned using the authorized budget start date, however, case-by-case judgments were also made to ignore the budget start date.
- FY17: same philosophy as previous fiscal years, however, many awards were included in this year if they allowed pre-award spending in fiscal year 2017.
- FY18 – this year, there was agreement from School and OSP leadership, to move to the industry standard for counting award dollars, which is any award received at OSP by the end of June that is ready for account setup will be processed for inclusion in FY18, regardless of the budget start date.
The new methodology, will ensure consistent treatment and counting of awards, enable OSP to provide award data more rapidly, and ensures that there is common understanding in how fiscal years numbers are derived. It further offers an ability to accurately compare (apples to apples) and see the state of research growth over time.
Example: A PI’s proposed three-year project worth $3M is accepted. The project receives funding authority for $800,000 and then another one for $200,000 during the first year.
The Award Funding Increments increase each time an award receives award funding authority. Therefore, at the end of Year 1, the Award Dollars will be $1M, the Award Funding Increments will be two, but the Award Count will still be one.

NOTE: In the process of cleaning historic data, we found that $0 awards were included in the award counts prior to FY17. We took the opportunity to take out the $0 awards from the counts. Therefore, the award counts for FY16 or older may be slightly different from what was reported to the BOV in those past years.