UNB Research

Behind every research project undertaken at UNB, there’s a team of dedicated professionals who work to support it.

Our institution’s Office of Research Services (ORS) ensures that the administrative elements of every project, from grant applications to fund administration to institutional reporting, are properly carried out.

This work upholds UNB’s reputation as a responsible steward of research funding, while relieving the administrative workload from the research teams, enabling them to focus on what they do best: creating new, impactful knowledge and innovation.

But even within an administrative landscape full of accounting processes and spreadsheets, the ORS team still looks for opportunities to exercise creativity and innovation.

We were recently reminded of this at the Canadian Association of Research Administrators’ (CARA) 2025 Canadian Conference on Research Administration, held in Fredericton in May.

 At the conference, UNB’s Kara MacGillivray, a financial analyst in research finance, was recognized by Canada’s tri-agency funders for her contributions to improving the user experience for the financial reporting process used by the agencies.

The Financial Data Submission and Reconciliation (FDSR) system provides a unified, web-based portal for institutions to upload the data required for federal reporting to all three funding bodies, which they had implemented with a goal of making reporting more efficient and less error prone.

However, because individual colleges and universities use different systems to manage and report on financial information, many institutions have struggled to directly connect one system to another.

“Many universities, including UNB, were having trouble bringing together the data from their financial tracking systems and uploading these to the FDSR portal without numerous errors requiring a lot of manual work to correct,” said Charlotte McIntosh, UNB’s director of research finance.

“Due to the high number of tri-agency grants (at UNB, for example, 26 per cent of all active accounts last year included such grants), this process has required significant time, effort and resources to complete across the sector.”

In 2023, MacGillivray provided a template spreadsheet to the tri-agencies to help explain and streamline the process of information collection and submission. Her goal was to help make the process faster and more accurate. She was also invited to help tri-agency staff update their instructions for the system as an end-user.

“I shared the template with the agencies with the hope that they could share the information with other universities that were struggling with how to import the information electronically,” said MacGillivray.

“The template is now provided as an example in the instructions for the portal.”

Then, last year, she saw an opportunity to expand this approach and add automation to UNB’s end-of-year reporting process. With the help of ORS software support specialist Chelsey Rickard, MacGillivray designed, developed and implemented a spreadsheet that could automatically retrieve information from UNB’s internal accounting system, perform the calculations required to transform it into what was required by the FDSR, and populate the template accordingly.

“I felt it was important to share this information at the CARA conference, so it might benefit other universities that were struggling to find a more efficient way to do their end of year reporting, Especially those who had limited supports and resources to develop their own solution,” says MacGillivray.

“By sharing this information and template, we can help other institutions complete the entire end-of-year tri-agency reporting, using a simple Excel spreadsheet, improving their efficiency and reducing errors.”

This open sharing of resources, solutions and insights among institutions reflects the collegial and cooperative, rather than competitive, culture of the research administration community. It also shows the generosity and the curious and solution-oriented mindset of members of that community—like MacGillivray and Rickard.

“I’m proud to see Kara recognized in this way,” said Dr. David MaGee, UNB’s vice president research.

“Her contributions, along with Chelsey’s, reflect the specialized knowledge as well as the creativity and ingenuity found in our administrative offices. Though they are not often in the spotlight, their work is essential to our research enterprise, and to our community’s efforts to build better futures by creating knowledge and transforming it into impact.”

Since the conference, MacGillivray has been receiving requests for her template from other institutions—and she welcomes these requests. If you would like to connect with Kara about this topic, her contact information is available on our website.

Photo: Stephen MacGillivray