Contracts, grants, and invoices#
A contract defines our formal relationship with any external organizations or people. We use invoices to exchange funds (incoming and outgoing) that are related to contracts. This section describes where you can find information about our active and past contracts and invoices.
Active contracts#
CS&S tracks all of our contracts in an AirTable. We synchronize this AirTable to our own in the link below, and generate dashboards to summarize important data. Any columns that are synchronized with CS&S have a little lightning bolt (⚡) next to them.
This table includes both service contracts and grants. Each row in this table is a single contract. Each column is a piece of metadata about that contract. There may be multiple contracts (rows) for a single community, representing different periods of time that a contract was active.
What funds remain in a contract or grant?#
Whenever an invoice is created by CS&S, it is recorded in our Invoices AirTable and linked to an active grant.
Invoices begin in a Draft state, and become Authorized when they are ready to be sent out.
When an invoice is Authorized we consider it Net Income and subtract its total from the grant.
Special columns#
There are a few special columns worth highlighting, they are described below.
Custom columns#
There are several columns that we add on our own.
We show each of these columns in our Our added columns view.
As new columns are added, please add them to this view.
These are not sources of truth unless explicitly stated
In many cases we add custom columns manually in order to facilitate visualization, reporting, etc. These may not be well-structured or documented, and may not correspond to concrete things like specific contract types. Unless otherwise stated, don’t consider our custom airtable columns as a source of truth.
Linked Invoices column#
Each contract has a list of the invoices that have been billed against it in the Invoices column.
This list of invoices is in the Invoices column.
See below for more context on how we use this.
Service Type column#
We have one custom column that we add to the CS&S data, to represent the type of service attached to a contract. For example, whether a contract is for a research hub or an educational hub. The specific categories are still in flux but the goal is to help us break down where our revenue is coming from in our invoices dashboards.
Invoices#
CS&S tracks all of our invoices in an AirTable. We synchronize this AirTable to our own in the link below, and generate dashboards to summarize important data. Any columns that are synchronized with CS&S have a little lightning bolt (⚡) next to them.
Each row represents a single invoice.
Each column represents metadata about that invoice (for example, the Type column encodes whether it is an incoming (ACCREC) or outgoing (ACCPAY) invoice.
The Zero ID column#
Each invoice has a unique identifier in the Xero ID column.
We use the Link Invoices AirTable automation to link each Invoice record to its corresponding Contract using this ID.
Linked Contracts column#
Each Invoice record is linked to its corresponding Contract record via the Contracts linked field.
Dashboards#
We use an AirTable Interface to summarize important information about our contracts and invoices. It should be relatively self-explanatory, with section headers describing the primary question each group of graphs is meant to answer. Each graph should also have a title and subtitle describing its meaning. You can gain access to it with this invitation link.
Grant folders#
We use the 2i2c Team Drive -> Finances and Accounting -> Grants folder to keep track of any materials related to a grant we are applying for or have received.
We use that same folder to track all of our preparations and materials for grants that we are applying for.
The Active and In Progress folder contains any grant that we’ve received, or that are in the middle of applying for.
The Rejected and Not Submitted folder contains any grant that we applied for and did not get, or that we started but did not finish.
The Completed folder contains any grant that we received and have now completed such that no action is needed.