COVID-19 Expense Guidelines

Posting COVID-19 Related Expenses

The following guidance is to address questions about charging of COVID-19 related expenses.

There are two institutional activity/subactivity combinations for transactions related to COVID-19:

• Activity 346202-Emergency Operations, 1004-Coronavirus should only be used for expenses that are directly related to the pandemic.  This include costs relating to quarantine that would not otherwise have been incurred, or expenses directly related to the Task Force working group.  Departments should not charge expenses to this activity unless approved by their fiscal officer.
• Activity 766007-Extraordinary Circumstances, 1004-Coronavirus should be used for student-related expenses.  Examples include extraordinary costs related to student travel and other student services, costs unique to preparing online courses, setting up virtual lab activities, etc.

Compensation should not be charged to these activities.

These values should only be used for incremental costs or refunds of revenue that are unique to coronavirus preparation, mitigation or other activities or actions that have been approved by the Dartmouth COVID-19 Task Force or one of the related working groups.  These activity/subactivity values should be used with the relevant department’s Org value and funding value.

These values should  not  be used for expenses such as travel that has been cancelled, expenses related to on-campus activities that have been cancelled or postponed (which may or may not have lost revenue associated with them).  These are costs that are incurred in the normal course of a department’s operations and should be charged to the chart string that those costs would normally be charged to.  For these types of expenses, departments and divisions should use best efforts to identify the expenses or lost revenues attributable to COVID-19 during their Q3 projections. 

Expenses that a department would normally pay for as part of its operations should use the departmental string that these costs would normally be charged to, including the funding that would normally be used.  Examples of costs that should be charged to a departmental string include:

• Hand sanitizer, wipes, etc
• Equipment to teach a course (ear buds, monitors, laptops, etc)
• Internet signal boosters or other items necessary to facilitate working from home.

Note that fiscal officers can request that sub-activity 1004-Coronavirus be set up to be used with activities other than the two listed above to assist in keeping track of these costs.

PLEASE NOTE:  If departments become aware of students who have a financial hardship that prevents them from buying textbooks, paying course-related fees or any other education-related circumstances, please refer those students to the appropriate financial aid office.  Departments should not purchase or otherwise provide aid to these students as there are strict federal guidelines and reporting requirements for student financial aid of all types.

If you have questions about whether it is appropriate to use the established COVID-19 activity/subactivity values, please contact Dianne Ingalls.