American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Funds Reporting and Compliance

Hello everybody. Welcome to our clearpoint webinar on using ARPA and ARPA reporting. I'm Ted Jackson, your host. Sorry, I have a little bit of a cold. I'm here today with Elena Keegan from Triangle J and Olivia Johnson from Orange County, North Carolina. Welcome you to. This is a, this is going to be a standard webinar. Y' all have been doing these for two years now. So you know. Please enter in any questions you have into the Q and A and we will try to get to them when we can. I'm going to give a very quick introduction into who clearpoint is for about four or five minutes and then we're going to move to an interview, an interview style format with Elena and Olivia to learn how they do ARPA reporting and please do ask questions along the way. So let me just share my screen just for a few minutes and then we will, we will move to the interview style. I shepherd I'm going to need screen sharing capabilities when I keep trying until it happens. There we go. So real quick. And again this is just five or six slides, so I'm going to go very quick today. Not even in slide presentation format. Again, some quick introductions, very small introduction into the way we view ARPA reporting in general and then we'll jump right into our interview. So here at clearpoint we have several hundred customers. We do a lot of work in local government. We're also market leaders in this field called strategy execution and strategy reporting. So what does that mean? Well, what we think about is this strategy reporting process where you may have objectives, measures, projects. You need to pull in data on a regular, on a regular reporting cycle. So maybe monthly, maybe quarterly. You then synthesize that data, meaning you do calculations, you do aggregations, you build charts, you do evaluations, whether things are on track or off track, you then add analysis to that. How are we doing? How is this project doing? How are our KPIs doing? You have owners do that analysis. We help with workflows and then we build reports and we can send different reports to different audiences on a schedule. And so we automate a lot of this process. And as we were helping many of our clients with this, and as I said, about half of our clients are in local government. They started asking us, well, can we do ARPA reporting with your reporting software? Our software is very configurable and we can customize all the layouts and the fields. And we said, well, let's figure out what ARPA reporting is and see how we can help. And so I'm assuming most of you know this already, but just in case some of you have accidentally joined this webinar, ARPA stands for the American Rescue Plan Act. And then within arpa, there is a state and local fiscal recovery funds program. So I haven't heard anybody say this acronym out loud or pronounce it. So we'll just say the SLFRF program, right? That program delivered $350 billion to state, local tribal governments across the country to support their response and recovery from COVID Okay, so this money has been delivered over several years. And the only catch to that was that you need to report on how you're spending the money. And then over time, treasury, the U.S. treasury has created some guidelines and, and then modified those guidelines at every single reporting cycle. And right now there are 83 expenditure categories in seven expenditure category groups. And then you need to provide reporting around project names, funding, expenditures, subcontracting. You need to provide use of evidence across every project. And then depending on how big of an organization you are or what type of organization. Those are our columns there in gray. You need to provide reports, whether they're project and expenditure reports or recovery plan performance reports. And your requirements are different based on what type of organization you are. But to us, reporting is really tricky because typically what we see is funding is coming through a budget or finance department, but then the expenditures can be managed by project teams that are in different departments. And collecting information about these projects can be time consuming and unmanageable because sometimes projects are subcontracted out. And then reporting, which is done by your budget or finance department needs to be done through a US treasury portal. And then you need to have comprehensive report documents. And some of you, depending on how big your organization is, needs to provide a website link to your own website that shows where you're spending your funding. And so what we realized we could do is help you keep your projects all in one place. View your spending by expenditure category or expenditure category group, and get your information updated with workflows. And then we could provide all the reports and in templates that way. But for this webinar, we're not going to be doing a clearpoint commercial, because we can do that at any point in time. And as you will learn, based on the way that different people report with arpa, your situation may be completely different. So with that, I'm going to start this interview with you, Elena. You're from Triangle J. Tell me a little bit about who Triangle J is and how you got into the ARPA business.

Yeah, Absolutely. So, good afternoon, everyone. Nice to be here with you today. So Triangle J is the organization I work for. We are what's called a council of government. So I don't know how many folks are from the state of North Carolina. You don't have to be from North Carolina to have experience with our type of organization, but you might know it by a different name, such as a regional council or a metropolitan planning organization or some other iteration of regional government. So we work with the Research Triangle region of North Carolina. So we represent seven counties and 46 local governments in total. And we. We do a range of work. We are not just involved in arpa. We normally are not involved in arpa, obviously, because it's only a couple years old. We have worked with those local governments on a range of issues for about 40 years now. So we've been in place for a long time. And we're. We're constantly changing what we're working on based on what our local governments need from us. And so in early 2021, we started hearing from our local governments that everyone was trying to understand what was going on with the American Rescue plan, both the funding that was coming to them directly and also the funding that was going to other agencies, both at the federal level and the state level. We started convening all of our local governments at the beginning. I'm sure many of you, if you have been involved with ARPA for a while, were playing the fun game of figuring out what it was going to be for quite some time. There was interim rules, and there was changes. And so at the beginning, we were really mostly convening our local governments, trying to help them think through what the final guidance was gonna look like and how they would implement that in their organizations. And we also did receive. Our state was thoughtful enough to provide funding to all of the council of governments in the state to specifically assist our local governments with this. This process. They realized there was a significant amount of burden. Every local government had to sort of figure out their plan, figure out how they're going to get the funding, go through some pretty intensive steps. And so we were. We were nice enough to be given that money, so.

Oh, excellent. And let's talk about, like, what people were doing, you know, for reporting prior to your adoption of clearpoint. Maybe you could even talk about kind of where clearpoint sits and your help of reporting. But then we can bring Olivia in and hear a little bit about, like, what it was like pre clearpoint and then. And then post that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think Olivia has gotten to benefit from mostly being involved with clearpoint. I feel like you didn't actually have to experience as much with the pre clearpoint, but yeah, so one of the things that we started seeing that was a challenge across every community was reporting. And so this was both programmatic reporting and sort of accounting, audit, compliance reporting. You know, both of those elements were really challenging for all of our communities, especially since there was continual changes from treasury on what was expected for different categories. And there was also a lot of unknowns for quite some time of what was going to be expected for local governments at different levels. And there's just continued to be changes, including things like revenue replacement more recently. It's been only a couple of months that they changed what they expect from reporting on revenue replacement. So it's been a continual process and so we started working with some of our communities, just helping them with reporting and the process was, was quite chaotic for everyone. So we started noting that we can see that folks were really struggling to up with the changes from treasury to keep up with it internally. They had, you know, multiple systems, both their accounting system and then some sort of programmatic system or process that weren't necessarily meshing together. And so reporting season, which was, you know, right around when the report was due, was a, was a mad rush to figure out all the information. And so that's when we started looking into if there was any sort of system that would potentially be able to help all of our communities that have, especially the ones that have a lot of projects, have a central place for all of their information that they need, both for the treasury portal and then also for the other sort of reporting or compliance documentation that they need to have.

Okay, excellent. And Olivia, you're with Orange county, as the ARPA coordinator for people that are not in North Carolina, why don't you tell them a little bit about Orange county and then how you do your ARPA reporting today?

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Ted. So Orange county is in Hillsborough, North Carolina and I came on just like three or four months ago now to start helping with the ARPA reporting specifically. And when I came in we were just considering using the ClearPoint software. And what kind of made us push over the edge and decide to do that was just the ever changing guidance from Treasury. So Elena and Triangle J have really helped us keep all of the expenditure categories up to date and then adding the fields in clearpoint where we need specific information based on the project type. And so that's something that we struggled with before using the software because we were using Like a Google Excel template. And, and then that was something that had to be you continually updated as the requirements changed. So that kind of took the burden off of us to have to make those updates. So now we are, we're able to just go into the portal and select the expenditure category and, and input, you know, the information that we know is required for that specific project. And so and then Elena, you hit on also that the revenue replacement projects are not required to be reported in the treasury portal. And so that was one of the one difference that, you know, in the data that we get from clearpoint versus the data that we could just download from the treasury portal, you if we only rely on that treasury data, we're not seeing the full picture and we needed a place where we could put all of our projects so that when a single audit or any other reason we would need to pull together that information, we have it in one place.

So it sounds like you're able to see everything that you're doing. Even though you're only required to do certain things for treasury, it's still capture all of your spending, so to speak.

Yes, well, and it's easy to filter out what you need for the treasury portal because it's that expenditure category 6 is revenue replacement. And so if we just filter out that one, then we know everything else needs to go into the portal.

Gotcha. Do you have like, are you the only person that's kind of trying to manage this information or do you have multiple people in the county or do you have subrecipients? Are they trying to use the tool or do they still kind of come into you and you.

So right now, just because we don't have a ton of ARPA projects, I think we have 24 total and some are already complete or nearing completion. And then I think we have two that have subrecipients. So because it's a smaller project load, I'm able to manage that and be the point person for like putting the data into clearpoint. But I do have to work with the finance team to. And a lot of times I can pull the data myself from the accounting system and then the individual departments that are, you know, in charge of running the program and have all of that performance data that we need. So yes, it's. And we do have, we have one other person on the team that is an intern, so he's helping us part time just for like the data collection and reporting piece. So it's a little more than a one person job I guess.

Right. Is the like, so let's talk a little bit about that data collection piece. Is it easy, complicated? Like, how is it, how does it work? A little bit of the nuts and bolts? Like, are you just able to ask your finance department, hey, give me all of our ARPA reports, or is it, you know, walk us through that process a little bit?

So we've tried to make it as simple as possible for the, for the departments. And so I will go into the accounting software and pull together, you know, Excel files of all of the, all of the expenditure data that we need and obligation data to report for each quarter. And we set up an internal process where I save all of that data into the attachment section in clearpoint so that we're able to easily reference back what was reported for each quarter. And then the programmatic data we. So what we were doing before with that Google sheet was just sending it out to all of the departments, and then they're having to go through and figure out, you know, what applies to them. And so what we've done is you determine, okay, these are the, these are the fields and the performance measures that we need for your specific project. And, and then we'll just reach out, you know, it could be as simple as, like an email. Ask them. Sorry.

I can turn the question to Elena. Tell us a little bit about Elena. How other counties or cities within Triangle J are managing their reporting.

Yeah, so I think a big piece that Olivia touched on a little bit that I think actually Orange county doesn't have as much of, of a lift on is the subaward process, the subrecipient process. And so that is a very significant piece of the compliance activities. And so it is. That is another thing that people are using clearpoint for. And you also do have to report on. So I know a number of our communities are the ones that are using clearpoint for their subaward process are able to continually share, from a viewer perspective, the data that they're tracking on subawards with the subawardees without them necessarily manipulating the data. So there's that view option that you can provide. And so that's a good way to keep folks because often sub awardees are not necessarily within the community or the local government. They might be nonprofits or others that you're working with. And so that's a good way to kind of collect the information and be able to communicate to them and make sure that it's correct live.

So in that situation, are the, are we, are you using the clearpoint reporting capabilities to send out reports to the subawards or do they log in and just have their permissions restricted to their subawards?

So we have one community that actually does have a few that can actually log in and report. We have personally set up the Triangle J system a little bit differently than some other communities might. So I know that for some of our larger communities, they've discussed adding account, you know, user accounts for each of either their sub awards or for each of their departments because you can have them submit reports through the system. We had the way that we've set it up because we have so many different communities that are using the account underneath us. The communities usually have one or two folks using the account. So a lot of them are not necessarily doing that reporting where everyone is submitting the reports in the system. It's more sort of their reporting and making sure that the information is correct with external folks. But that has been a conversation because I know there are a couple of our local governments who have really large subaward processes, like above 70 subawards with nonprofit partners. And so for those folks, there's definitely a conversation happening about using clearpoint to actually have that be where they would submit their information.

Gotcha. So, Olivia, sorry to cut you off.

I'm back. I'm sorry.

So how have you all adjusted to kind of the continual updates from treasury for new requirements for reporting? You talked about it a little bit, just in kind of tweaking in clearpoint. But does it also change the way that you communicate to the departments on what they need to be tracking?

Oh, for sure. I mean, I feel like it.

Go ahead, go ahead.

No, it changes as it changes quarterly. Then we'll have to communicate that back to the department. And so we're taking a look back every time, you know, at the latest guidance before reaching out to the departments and asking for that programmatic data. I guess the good thing is that for the most part, when we know the constant is going to be that the current period, expenditures, total expenditures and the obligations, all of that data is always going to be required. And so there are some things like that that we can feel comfortable still pulling together and then. But then for the other projects, we have to go back and look at the, you know, the performance measures that are maybe have changed and like Elena said, the revenue replacement continues to change, but it's always in our favor where it seems to be fewer and fewer reporting requirements.

Okay, let me ask one more question. And then, and then I'll show a little bit of clearpoint, just generic information and again, anyone who's, who's participating or listening to this webinar, you're welcome to ask questions if you would like. But. And then maybe this is for Elena and also, Olivia, since you're part of this council of governments, do you all get together on a regular basis and discuss like arpa? And is there, you know, do you get benefits out of best practice sharing? Have you learned kind of from each other in different areas on how you can improve your reporting or even get different ideas? I don't want to say for spending, but for managing ARPA dollars? Love to hear a little more about that as well.

Yeah, I mean, Olivia, if you have anything you'd like to share, you're welcome to. I know. I mean, we've been convening folks for quite some time. I think there was a lot of time spent just with us all making sure that everyone understood what was being asked of them. So I think there's been, I think we're kind of entering a stage where treasury is potentially changing things a little less. I don't know how many folks on this call get emails regularly from them about this program. They seem to be winding down their approach to the program. And so I think what that indicates is at the very least, that there's probably going to be less changes just because they have less capacity to make changes or add new information. And so there's probably more opportunity looking forward for best practices. I do know we've, we've had a lot of best practice sharing about the subaward process because that one has a large burden from the compliance side of things and a lot of expectations for the subawards that receive the money unless they are potentially receiving revenue replacement funds. But yeah, for the past couple of years, we've had standing meetings for anyone that's interested. I will say it's kind of shifted to be mostly our larger communities because anyone who has less than $10 million in ARPA funds theoretically falls under revenue replacement entirely and has been able to have a lot of flexibility with that. So that's how we've been approaching it to this point. I don't know if you already mean to add, Olivia.

Yeah, no, I'll say that, like, those meetings are helpful to hear, like, what, what other groups are doing and then just to have a forum to ask questions and to see, you know, what other people, you know, are facing also. And yet the, we recently went through the, the subrecipient review just because we don't have very many projects that have a subrecipient or a sub award and, and just having to like go through those different requirements. It was helpful to have a forum to ask questions there.

Yeah, I would say that's definitely been the most burdensome part for folks. I think the other categories from under arpa, I mean, there is still burden, but they are somewhat like an unknown. Unknown. Right. A lot of folks have done water and sewer projects before, other things like that. The sub award process just pulls in stakeholders that may not have received federal funds before. And that's where I think a lot of the stress comes through. So there's a lot of, you know, upfront setting up expectations for reporting, setting up expectations for monitoring, making sure folks know what their activities are, what's eligible and what's not eligible in terms of expenditures, and communicating that to folks who just may not have had federal funds in the past.

Right, excellent.

Yeah.

Well, let me just show really briefly what clearpoint looks like at the highest level. And again, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but here in clearpoint, imagine we have an executive summary area for ARPA management. If you've been involved with arpa, you know that based on every single expenditure category, you're required to report on different items. And so we tried to break it down so that you could very easily see for expenditure categories 1.1 to 1.3, you would have, you know, all of these different items that you could report on, you know, based on, you know, what the project is supposed to be accomplishing. And then for a simple template, you know, we took all those same pieces and broke them down into very nice, easy report area. And then if you did have sub recipients, you could drill down to the subrecipients. And then also if you had sub awards, there would be a sub award area as well. And it's really straightforward. But you could imagine you could track all of your projects and then build all of the reports that you need kind of across all of ARPA as a whole. And I think you heard from Olivia and Elena that smaller organizations don't have as burdensome reporting requirements. And then other people are not using, say all 77 categories, but they're just using certain ones. So this is a great way to go in, get your information, know whether your sub awards or your expenditures are greater than 50,000, less than 50,000, you're making payments to individuals, you can build all the reports that you need and then be able to export it and send it out as needed for whether you're reporting to Treasury Whether you're reporting just internally to your own local government or whether you're putting something online for your citizens or your residents to see. So with that I'm going to give you, Elena and Olivia one last word if you would like, and then we can, we can wrap it up. Any, any tips or tricks for, for ARPA reporting for anyone who's still struggling with it today.

I do have like one thing that came to mind when you were going through the clearpoint portal just now is that the, each of the project pages, I like that they're configurable, that you can adjust the layout for what you need. And so recently I've been playing with those and trying to pull in only the fields that are necessary for a specific project. And so all of them will have like, you know, the project number and the expenditure data and then a description. But then maybe below we'll have number of households served or whatever the specific performance data is and then some type of graph showing how much you have in your budget and then how much you've spent so far. And so that's a nice like snapshot that we can export into PDF and then give to the departments or you know, in one of the briefing books give all of it to our cfo. And so that's something I've been recently learning more about and that's a nice feature too.

Oh, awesome Elena, from you.

I mean, I am not, I have obviously Olivia is the reporting expert. I would say just in general we've been just happy that we found clearpoint. I know we're not trying to sell clearpoint, but I do think it's been, it solved a lot. I mean, I know there was a lot that the Clearpoint team probably didn't know they were getting into tracking 80 something categories when they agreed to do this, but it really did make a difference and we had, we really weren't able to find another system that was, was set up to be useful in this way and we just saw the, the amount of work and sort of manual efforts that were going, going on with a lot of our communities. So we were really happy to be able to partner with you and I think it's just made the process easier for the folks that are using it. So.

Great.

That's all I'll say.

Thank you both very much for, for coming on today and sharing your experience and, and hopefully ARPA reporting will, the changes will stop and then we'll get into some sense of normalcy. So thank you again.

Thanks Ted.

All right, bye.