Federal grant compliance requirements are extensive, but the purchasing-related rules that cause the most problems cluster around a few specific areas. Knowing where the landmines are is the first step to avoiding them.
The labs that get audit findings are rarely the ones doing something flagrantly wrong. They're the ones who didn't know a particular threshold existed, or who missed a date, or who charged the right thing to the wrong account. Quiet mistakes, often by people who never saw the rule.
Account Restrictions and Period of Performance
Every grant has a start and end date. Charges must be incurred during that period. Many institutions also have rules about spending in the final 90 days of a grant — large equipment purchases, for example, often require prior approval near the end of a grant period because there's insufficient time to demonstrate use.
The trap here is that "incurred" is not the same as "paid." A purchase order placed two days before the grant ends, for an item that ships a week later and gets invoiced a month after that, may or may not be allowable depending on the institution and the agency. Labs that don't track period-of-performance carefully tend to discover the answer the hard way.
Allowable Costs
Federal grants prohibit certain categories of expense regardless of whether they're lab-related — entertainment, alcoholic beverages, personal items, and certain types of food. The OMB Uniform Guidance (2 CFR Part 200) is the authoritative source for federal grant allowability; individual agencies may impose additional restrictions.
Most disallowances in this category aren't deliberate fraud. They're a lab manager charging coffee for the lab meeting to the wrong account, or a piece of equipment with a dual research/personal use case that wasn't properly justified.
Prior Approval Thresholds
Equipment purchases above a certain value typically require program officer approval before the purchase is made, not after. NIH's threshold for prior approval is currently $25,000 for equipment; NSF's is lower for many awards. Missing these thresholds doesn't just create an audit finding — it can result in disallowance of the entire purchase.
This is the area where automated workflow rules pay for themselves fastest. A $24,000 purchase and a $26,000 purchase look identical to whoever is placing the order. The system has to know which one needs prior approval.
Effort Certification
Less directly a purchasing issue, but related: purchases charged to a grant are expected to connect to the work the grant is funding. "We charged lab supplies to Grant X" requires that actual research under Grant X was occurring when those supplies were used.
The thread that runs through all of this: none of it is particularly complicated to follow when you know the rules. The problem is that researchers placing orders often don't know the specific restrictions on a particular grant account, and no one has made it easy to check. The fix isn't more training — it's surfacing the relevant rule at the moment the order is placed.
Ixion models each of these restrictions as a structured rule on the account: period-of-performance dates, prior-approval thresholds, allowable-cost categories, required justifications. When a researcher places an order against the account, the system evaluates the rules and flags whatever needs attention — before the order moves forward. The postdoc doesn't need to memorize the NIH grants policy manual. The system does.