Cal Smart navigation and common reporting errors: tips from CTC training
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Summary
CTC’s hands‑on demo showed how to export prior project lists, link or unlink projects, split receipts for reconciliation, and avoid common entry mistakes that cause mismatched totals in Cal Smart.
During a live Cal Smart demonstration, Alicia Socorra, program manager at the California Transportation Commission, showed step‑by‑step how to prepare and submit the RMRA/Local Streets and Roads expenditure report and highlighted common mistakes that produce reconciliation errors.
Socorra demonstrated exporting the proposed project list and prior fiscal year project list to Excel so jurisdictions can prefill or reconcile entries. She demonstrated linking prior proposed projects to current expenditure reporting, using an ‘‘undo/unlink’’ option when an incorrect project was linked, and editing component entries (preconstruction vs construction) to ensure totals match. In the demo she purposely linked the wrong project, used the undo feature, and walked through updating project component values to restore internal consistency.
The presenter also walked through a typical reconciliation error scenario: a jurisdiction’s intake page reported $6,000,000 in total RMRA expenditures but the detailed project entries summed to $4,000,000. Socorra recommended generating the PDF summary produced by Cal Smart to identify the missing or mis‑entered project, then add or correct the missing project entry and re‑run the totals. She advised that rounding inconsistencies (omitting cents in one place and including them elsewhere) can also trigger reconciliation errors.
Practical tips offered in the session included: create internal project IDs to avoid duplicate project entries, coordinate public works and finance staff (enter project detail first and leave zeros for finance to fill later), stop attempting logins after two failed attempts (use password reset to avoid lockouts), and, if necessary to meet the deadline, submit a report and request it be returned for edits so the filing deadline is satisfied while allowing time for corrections.
Socorra closed with resource links attendees can use to check apportionments (State Controller’s Office remittance advice) and original estimates (California Local Government Almanac), and reiterated that CTC will publish the training recording and handouts.