Writing a grant budget

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 10 min

Questions

• How do I determine costs to a project?

• Where do I start with preparing a budget?

• Are there examples of budgets I can work from?

Objectives

• Learn how to plan and write up a budget

Large-scale grants

Large-scale grants (i.e., NSERC, CIHR, SSHRC, Genome Canada) are only available to permanent faculty at a Canadian institution (or those with at least a 5-year research contract), so we will focus on small-scale grants for this tutorial. The Office of the Vice President of Research (OVPR) at the UofS has an entire team that helps researchers secure grant money for large-scale projects.

Small-scale grants

Grants commonly applied for by Post-docs, Grad students and other researchers in agriculture are the Agriculture Development Fund (ADF) through the Government of Saskatchewan, MITACS grants, and other industry-specific grants. OVPR may be able to help with some resources for small-scale grants, but are more interested in helping secure large-scale grants. We will focus on small-scale grants in this lesson.

Determining costs to a project

For most grants, there are 4 main expense categories that you will have to budget for: salary, consumables (also called materials and supplies), equipment and services from others. Depending on the agency, there may be an other category as well.

Salary: Think about the work you want to get done in your proposal. Will you need a Technician? A Research Assistant? A grad student? How long will it take them to do the work? For grad students, you should be looking at funding an MSc for 2.5 and PhD for 4 years, rates are dependent on the Principal Investigator (P.I.). Find a person in your department who deals with hiring. In our case, the Project Manager for the P.I. or the admin staff in Plant Sciences are really helpful. Salary cost to the project includes benefits to the employee, so be careful to include the total cost of hiring (salary+benefits). Make sure to include inflation over the course of the project. At the UofS we write in a 1.5% increase per year. And finally- make sure to write your own salary+benefits in the project!

Consumables: These expenses include anything that you will use up over the course of your project. Think lab chemicals and disposable materials (i.e. pipette tips, etc.). In most funding agencies there is a caveat that any equipment purchase under $1,000 would also fall under consumables. This could mean something like a laptop may go under this category. Make sure you take a close look at the guidelines of your funding agency to see what their specific requirements are, and how flexible they will be. Equipment and consumables can be tricky to categorise because each agency has their own rules.

Equipment: This is the place where you can budget in any equipment expenses that you may need to carry out your study. Funding agencies are very particular about this category, and many will not fund equipment purchases. So make sure you know whether something can be funded through the grant you’re writing, or whether you need to bring it in to the project another way (i.e. an in-kind contribution from another project).

Services from Others: This category is meant to budget any services you’ll be requesting from outside sources. It is really important to check various labs or companies that offer the service you’re requesting, as you’ll be asked to justify why you used one service provider over another. At the UofS, if a service will cost more than $10,000, at least 3 price-quotes will need to be provided to ConnectionPoint (they will help collect these, if you ask), or a single-source justification will need to be provided.

Other: This category can also be called G&A (genereal and administrative). This is a place where expenses associated with conferences and meetings can go. Search the horizon to see what meetings or lab visits that would be beneficial over the course of your project and choose one for yourself and the grad students on your project. Generally, you will be covering the cost of registration, accommodation, travel and food costs, so use a realistic ballpark amount. Publication costs can also be estimated and written into this category as well. Agencies are notoriously picky about this category, so make sure to find out what costs can be covered by the target funder.

Where do I start with writing a budget?

Read through the funding guidelines before you start. Understand what you can and can’t build into your budget. Knowing this in advance will save you time, and headache, and may be a deciding factor in whether your application is successful or not.

Next, take your cost categories and plug them into an excel sheet. Then it’s time to do your homework, or find someone to do it for you (see comments about ConnectionPoint, and making friends with admin staff). Lay out your hiring requirements, and find out how much people will cost the project. Then you can move on to consumables. If you don’t know how much you’re going to need in this category, ask someone who’s done similar work. The same goes for equipment, services and other. This will help you to get a ballpark number to work with, and you can work from there to add or take away from your proposal as needed. Taking the time to plan carefully here will also help you to justify your budget items, which is sometimes required as a separate document in funding applications.

Where can I find example budgets?

There are likely plenty of people around you at the UofS who have extensive experience writing budgets, both large and small-scale. The OVPR Grants Calendar maintains a Grants Repository for successfully awarded publications here. If you’re dreaming of applying for an NSERC someday, this repository has great examples of proposals/budgets to study and learn from. Ask your colleagues if they have any examples of past proposals and budgets from your target organisation (i.e. ADF, MITACS, etc.).

How do I get better at this?

1. Practice! Take the time to seek out and write grants for different agencies. Good feedback on a failed application will teach you far more than any tutorial.

2. Make friends with good admin people. These people work with information you’re looking for all the time. Sometimes, it’s all they do! Look to your Project Manager, admin staff in Plant Sciences, OVPR and Library Resources staff, ConnectionPoint; all of these people are paid to help people like you!

3. Look through old proposal applications, both successful and failed, if you can get your hands on some. Ask your colleagues, or see what you can find online.

Key Points

• Know the funding agency guidelines for spending before you start

• Find the people in your organisation who can help you

• Make sure you have costs of benefits built into salary totals

• Build inflation into salary costs over the course of the project

• Shop around and get quotes for high priced consumables and services