What is a PTA?

The majority of US universities use PTAs to track expenses charged to different accounts. A PTA is a bit like a bank account number in that it identifies a specific source of funding. However it’s more complicated in that it identifies the funding goal at 3 different levels, the Project, the Task, and the Award (P-T-A).

Every actively used funding source at a University is associated with at least one PTA. The P stands for Project, the T for Task, and the A for Award. Award refers to any unique source of funding that is given to a University. This includes federal research grants, donations, gifts, endowment funds, etc. Awards are used to fund Projects and Tasks. A Project refers to any university activity that has a specific enough purpose that the costs need to be linked to each other. Projects can be one time events, like a conference, or ongoing activities, like a R01 funded research program. Tasks are subdivisions of projects that exist to make things easier to track and report. Tasks are also where individual budgets are set.

Every single university expenditure is associated with at least one project. A project can span decades, or only one day. Projects can be very large. Some Projects span multiple University departments and/or organizations, are subdivided into many tasks, and require numerous awards as funding sources. Others are very simple, consisting of a single task and are funded by a single award. All projects are assigned a project owning organization, a project principal owner and a project manager. 

Large projects are often subdivided into multiple tasks. Separate tasks, each with its own owning organization, principal owner, and task manager, can be set up for different stakeholders working together on a single large project. Each of these tasks can be funded by the same original large grant or gift, or they could be funded by a collection of smaller sources of funding all with the same objective. Committed cost sharing is set up as a task on sponsored projects with a separate, non-federal funding source.

Awards, on the other hand, represent a unique source of funding to the university (e.g., sponsored award, gift, designated income, endowment, etc.). An award can fund one or more projects. Each award is assigned an award owning organization, an award principal owner, and an award manager (which may not be the same as the project or task assignments).