Sponsored programs · Post-award workflow
Live in 8–12 weeks. No new ERA system to buy. Runs in your tenant, on infrastructure you already own.
Cayuse, Kuali, Huron Click, and InfoEd are excellent at pre-award and compliance. Workday and Oracle compute F&A as ledger operations. None of them ship the post-award closeout workflow your team actually runs out of Outlook and Excel.
Sponsors require closeout submission within 90–120 days of grant end. Late closeouts cause audit findings, sponsor withholdings, and damage future-funding scoring.
The most experienced grant administrators end up coordinating closeouts manually — chasing PIs, reconciling expenses, drafting sponsor reports — work that should be templated and routed.
Universities average only 71% F&A recovery because manual reconciliation can't catch variances at scale. Our reconciliation engine compares actual charges against rate tables and surfaces gaps before they're audit findings.
When a sponsor question comes back 18 months later, nobody can find the original submission, supporting docs, or approval trail. Audit prep means archeology in shared drives.
Services
We phase engagements deliberately. You decide whether to continue after each phase based on what you learned — no multi-year contracts up front.
Stakeholder interviews, current-state workflow mapping, compliance gap analysis against federal regulations, future-state recommendation. Deliverable: a 30–60 page Discovery Report your VP for Research can take to the executive team.
The full workflow platform. Closeout, interim reporting, EB/F&A reconciliation, due-report tracking, multi-channel sponsor submission, role-based routing — built on Microsoft 365 you already own.
Ongoing maintenance, platform upgrades, sponsor format additions, enhancement releases. Annual contract, predictable cost, no surprises.
Approach
Every institution's workflow is different. We never carry assumptions from a prior engagement into a new one. We ask your questions, not our questions.
The platform is replaceable. The workflow is the value. We spend the most time in discovery and architecture, not implementation.
We reuse architectural patterns. We never reuse code. Every client gets a fresh build informed by our methodology — not copied from another client's implementation.
We never reference a prior client's data, rates, sponsor relationships, or internal interpretations to a new client. Each engagement is its own walled garden.
Every artifact passes automated verification and independent review before delivery. No regression ships during UAT.
Scope creep during a fix is how regressions ship. We fix what you reported and propose adjacent improvements separately for your decision.
“We don't replace your ERA system — we sit on top of your expenditure data. We solve the closeout and financial-reporting layer your team is currently running out of Outlook and Excel.”
About
Ady Villegas-Estrada is a research administration executive with over 17 years of progressive leadership experience at two of the nation's leading academic medical centers and research-intensive institutions.
He currently serves as Associate Director in the Office of Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania, where he oversees a portfolio of approximately $400 million in sponsored project funds and serves as an Authorized Organizational Representative for the institution.
Prior to Penn, Ady spent over 17 years at Weill Cornell Medicine, most recently as Assistant Director for Research Administration in the Department of Radiology. There, he led strategic growth initiatives that contributed to a 422% increase in NIH funding — moving the department into a top-5 national ranking. He scaled an 11-person research administration team, launched three new research institutes, and designed the PI-facing Tableau analytics dashboards still in use today.
Ady has served in multiple leadership roles in NCURA Region II, including Annual Meeting Program Chair (2023) and Treasurer (2018–2019). His published research on NIH funding dynamics and research administration data analysis appears in JAMA Network Open and Academic Medicine.
He holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Notre Dame and is a Certified Research Administrator (CRA).
Get in touch
The first conversation is a 30-minute discovery call — no slide deck, no pitch. We ask about your current workflow, you ask about how we work. If there's a fit, we propose a Discovery engagement. If not, you've spent 30 minutes and we've spent 30 minutes.