Expense Review Project
Expense Review is Cornell’s unified tool to review sponsored project expenses.
What is Expense Review?
- Cornell’s campus-wide tool to review your sponsored project expenses.
- Every month, Expense Review shows you a report of all your expenses, including salaries.
- You can record your reviews with a single button.
- Reviews can be quick: 50% of PIs had fewer than 10 rows to review per month; 97% averaged fewer than 100 rows.
- Designed to reduce administrative burden while helping Cornell meet federal agency requirements:
- Eliminates annual salary certification (after one last round for July-December 2025).
- Satisfies the 6 bimonthly reviews per year requirement.
- Meets federal, sponsored, university, and audit requirements.
- Helps identify errors within the 90-day cost transfer window, preventing using discretionary funds.
- Starting the week of February 16, all units and faculty/PIs must use Expense Review to record their reviews within six weeks.
- Department Admins may help by pre-reviewing reports and leaving you notes in the tool.
What Should I Do Now?
- Preview Expense Review
- (Department Admins) Request Act-As access
- PI Dashboard: pidash.cornell.edu
- Pilot Site: pidashboard-pilot.rais.cucloud.net
- Read Documentation
- In Expense Review, click Getting Started in the top right corner for a guided walk-through
- Attend Office Hours: Thursdays, 1-2 p.m
- Expense Review Online Help
- (For Admins) Training decks for admins and faculty/PIs are in a Teams Communication Channel
- December OSP Roundtable: Expense Review: Slide deck used in the OSP Roundtable presentation in December 2025.
- Introduction to the Project: Slide deck used in the OSP Roundtable presentation in January 2024.
- Give Feedback
- Submit comments or questions to the project team at pidash@cornell.edu.
Rollout Plan
- Oct-Jan: Start small with volunteers and grow
- Faculty/PIs and administrative staff pairs: Test workflow
- Departments: Address adoption challenges, messaging
- Volunteer colleges: Scale, validate training and messaging
- Jan-Feb 6: Onboard remaining units
- Jan-Feb: Training and onboarding support provided
- Volunteer colleges: Scale, validate training and messaging
- On Feb 9, Department Administrators will receive first monthly invitation email
- On Feb 16, Faculty/PIs will receive first monthly invitation email. Faculty/PIs are expected to review first report within 2 months.
Project Information
- Advisory Committee Members: In addition to the discovery interviews and user testing, this committee represents the voice of the faculty and staff users.
- Updates: Project updates may include: results of discovery interviews and user testing, presentation of design mockups, launch announcements, etc.
- Project Charter: The goals of the project, the scope of the work, the costs and benefits, and a description of the governance.
Join the project mailing list by emailing pi-dash-updates-L-request@cornell.edu with the subject “join”.