1. Budgeting for Human Capital
Amy Thomas
Class 3
COMPASS

2. Effort:
Effort is defined as the amount of time spent on a particular activity.  It includes the time spent working on a sponsored project in which salary is directly charged or contributed (cost-shared).

3. Faculty Salary & Effort:
Proposals should accurately represent the amount of direct research effort that key personnel are committing to the project.  The amount of effort committed to a sponsored project is based on a best estimate of the actual effort required to meet the goals and outcomes of the proposed project.

4. Summer Salary
Faculty may charge summer months across their sponsored projects portfolio.
If budgeted as summer effort, effort must be committed during the summer.  If budgeted as summer salary, effort cannot be committed during the academic year and paid out as summer effort/compensation
The rate of pay used for summer months must be the same rate of monthly pay for academic months

5. Other Project Staff
Other project staff consist of technicians, programmers, engineers, project coordinators, administrative/secretarial**, etc.
Effort is budgeted based on actual need and as allowable by sponsor.
Do not cost share effort in any way whether quantifiable or not unless the sponsor mandates cost sharing.

6. Administrative/Clerical Positions
Federal sponsors: In response to federal restrictions on the direct charging of administrative/clerical personnel to sponsored projects, budgets should only include these costs when:
The position is required by the project scope, due to the project's special purpose & circumstance where the services provided go above and beyond
Clarification: account monitoring, meeting arrangements, or typing general correspondence or reports on behalf of a grant/contract would be considered the normal services to be provided by the University and treated as an indirect cost; consequently they would NOT be allowed as a direct cost.

7. Postdoctoral Research Associates
Salary levels vary from department to department based on market and seniority – rates not to fall below mandated minimum.
Postdocs cannot be Principal Investigators in their own right. Postdocs must have their faculty advisor as a Co-PI. If sponsor guidelines do not allow for the budgeting of any faculty effort or if the program is strictly a Postdoc research grant or fellowship and specified as such in the sponsor guidelines, the faculty advisor should be included on internal routing.

8. Graduate Students
Determine annual salary, fringe, and tuition charge levels for every grad student on the project.
Graduate student pay and tuition remission rate is decided by the college/department.
Tuition Remission: 10, 20, 30 or 40% of the requested stipend must be included on every budget unless specifically disallowed by the sponsor.

9. Undergraduate Students
Budget using an hourly rate – must be at least the current minimum wage at least.
No fringe is used for undergraduates.

10. Fringe Benefit Rates FY 20
Full Time employees: 32.3%
Post Docs: 15.9%
Grad students: 4.4%
Undergrads: ZERO
Other:

11. Non AU Employees
PSC or Subs—COMING SOON!

12. Exercise 1
PI Smith plans on committing one summer month to her NSF project. What information do you need to help her calculate this?
What fringe rate will be applied?

13. Exercise 2
PI Jones wants to commite 20% of his academic months to his NIH project. What information do you need to help him calculate this?
What fringe rate will be applied?

14. Exercise 3
PI Jefferson will be committing 2 summer months. Additionally he will have a full time post doc dedicated to the project. What information do we need to complete the budget?
If he wishes to also add one grad student, what information do we need?

15. Let’s Meet John!!
Your faculty member, John Smith, comes to you with the NSF CAREER solicitation. He would like you to help him draft his budget and walk him through the submission process. John studies the correlation between mice ear size and obesity. He has never submitted to NSF before, but feels he has a good proposal. To start with, he knows he would like 3 summer months time each year, 50% of his post doc’s time on the project, and one grad student. His CoPi would also like one summer month each year. He thinks he would like 2 undergraduates as well. Finally, he promised the departmental admin assistant he would get her some additional pay for all her hard work. He would like to budget 5K in salary for her as well. Put a budget together for John’s personnel section of his budget including all direct costs discussed here.
He would also like you to draft a budget justification for the project.