Proposal Routing & Approvals

Below is a summary of how to view, review, and approve proposals to the Office of Pre-Award Services (OPAS) for sponsor submission.

Procedure Overview: Kuali routing requires the standard two-stage approvals process (i.e. department and college level approvals). Please be aware of the OPAS five-day submission requirement, which requires that the proposal and all approvals be complete before OPAS logs in the proposal,  and includes the two- day deadline for final science documents.

IMPORTANT: Principal Investigators (PIs) and Co-PIs must complete two steps during routing if they have not certified the proposal prior to routing for approvals. Certification involves directly answering a few questions in the Proposal Person Certification Questionnaire which is found in the Key Person tab, in the Proposal Person Panel. When approving, PIs and Co-PIs will receive an error warning. Click Fix It and then Certify. Then go back to the Summary/Submit tab and Approve. See Kuali Knowledge Base Summary/Submit instructions for more details.

STEP 1 – When a proposal is ready for review, all approvers and delegates will receive an email with a link to the proposal and the option to go to your Action List (if you have multiple proposals to review).

Alternatively, you can log directly into Kuali and find proposals needing your approval via the Dashboard. See guide on Logging in and Navigating the Kuali Dashboard for additional information.

STEP 2 – Proposal Summary – When you access the proposal record, you can review proposal related information prior to routing, including: credit allocations, questionnaires, routing map, etc.

STEP 3 – Evaluating Credit Allocations – Click the Credit Allocation tab to evaluate both RTF and Intellectual distributions.

IMPORTANT: Regardless of how many PIs you have on the file or how the Intellectual Merit is split up, make sure that each PI has 100 listed next to their department line.

STEP 4 – Evaluating Budget – Click the Budget Summary tab to view and evaluate the budget.

STEP 5 – PI Certification (only for Key Personnel on the routing map) - When entering the proposal for review and approval click Approve.

From there a data validation will appear. Where is says “The Investigators are not all certified...”, click the blue Fix It link.

Investigators need to answer the certifications question, then click save.

PLEASE NOTE: AFTER INVESTIGATORS CERTIFY, THEY MUST GO BACK TO THE SUMMARY/SUBMIT SCREEN TO APPROVE.

STEP 6 – Approve or Return Proposal – On the Proposal Summary screen, click Approve or Return.

Reviewer/Approver Actions: The following are the approver options when a document is routed:

• Approve: This signifies your approval of the proposal and allows it to continue along the workflow path. You may receive a message asking if you wish to receive future approval requests if you also appear in a future workflow stop. Clicking Yes will require you to approve again at the future stop, whereas, clicking No will automatically approve on your behalf at the future stop.
• Return: If the proposal requires substantial corrections, the return action will return the proposal to the aggregator for necessary changes. If you click Return, you must then enter a reason for the action in the confirmation window that appears. Once returned, all of the proposal details, narratives, and budget can be fully edited by the aggregator and then resubmitted into the approval routing workflow for submission.

Other Resources

See also Kuali Knowledge Base instructions, including those for Ad Hoc Routing.