Any plan can go through many revisions over the course of its lifespan. The scope may be altered; new objectives and activities can be added. Your final budget could end up looking nothing like your starting budget! But how can you keep up with all of these changes? It's always a good idea to keep your own records, but NOVA has an extremely useful built-in function that gets frequently overlooked...

Your Application History is waiting for you!

Located conveniently at the top-right corner of each of your certified plans, you'll find the unassuming "Application History" button. But what does it do? Clicking on this link will take you to the plan's "Project Timeline" which contains a long list of events that the plan has gone through. Some of the recorded events include:

• Plan Certified

• Plan Uncertified

• Plan Submitted

• Approval Submitted

• Fiscal Report Submitted

• Fiscal Reports Approved

The user information and timestamps attached to each of these events can be extremely helpful when looking back to figure out what happened, but certain events also contain invaluable records to give you a better glimpse of how things used to be.

Available Historical Records

Fiscal Reports Approved

This event refers to when an entire year's fiscal reports have been certified by the assigned certifying authority. When this certification is granted, NOVA will take a snapshot of the Q4 fiscal reports as they were submitted at that time. These snapshots are available for you to download as PDF or HTML, depending on your needs.

Since Community College Strong Workforce fiscals are reported cumulatively between fiscal years, you may have found yourself in a situation where the prior years' fiscal report needed to be un-certified and revised. But a year later, you may be looking back and wondering "why aren't these numbers the same as I remember them?". Quickly reviewing the fiscal report timeline may help jog your memory. "Oh yeah, we had to change those numbers!"

Plan Certified

This event refers to when a plan has been fully certified by your state monitor. At this point in time, a snapshot is taken of your entire plan as it was approved. Obviously, this can be immensely helpful when you need to figure out how something used to look.

But beyond keeping PDF and HTML records of every iteration your plan has gone through, there is also a much more powerful tool at your disposal--"Compare Changes".

Compare Changes

NOVA budgets can quickly get unruly, especially once you've modified that budget multiple times. But hidden within the "Application History", tucked within "Plan Certified" events, you may see the third button "Compare Changes." Clicking this button will take you to a separate page where you are able to view and compare every iteration of your plan's budget that has been certified.

Start by selecting which two versions of your budget you'd like to compare. The left dropdown "Previous Version" should have the older budget of the two you wish to compare, and the right dropdown "More Recent Version" should have the newer.

As you click between your historical budgets, you'll see the full plan budget summary below start to change. If the two versions of your plan that you're comparing included any modifications to your budget, you'll see them in this section.

• If details were DELETED, it will be struck out in RED TEXT.

• If details were ADDED, it will be underlined in GREEN TEXT.