 I'm one of the big in the egg budget office. I receive your proposals that come from the department that have departmental form. I look at them reviewing the budget and the other forms that may come along. And one of the things that I found that is probably the biggest thing about the budget narrative, it takes a lot of time to do it. It's detailed work. It's probably one of the least favorite parts of doing a grant proposal. So what I'm going to be doing today is I'm going to give you a couple examples of budget narratives that have come from actual proposals from two people in this room. They'll remain nameless. But one of them you can probably tell by looking at what they're requesting. You can probably figure out who it is. It's not a secret or anything. But I just thought it would be helpful to use actual information that I've gotten from actual proposals. I've written this budget narrative based on what you would be using with the USDA AFRI proposal. A lot of you would write those. And even though this is for an AFRI proposal, that's not to say that you couldn't use this for other grant projects as well. The underlying principle is still the same. The purpose of the budget narrative is to explain or describe what can't be explained by looking at the budget form itself. It's just a further explanation of what you're doing, what you're buying, giving just a little more detail. And you want your budget narrative to be cleared. You want it to be easy to read. It should be a narrative form. You shouldn't have spreadsheets and that kind of thing attached. Sometimes it's, depending on the sponsor guidelines, it's easier to put things in tables and that's fine. There's a lot of different rules. And as you've heard many times today, follow the instructions. I can tell you this is how we might like to see it for NIFA. That doesn't mean that that's appropriate for everyone. I know NRCS is very strict and very detailed about what they require for budget narratives. They want things broken up by year. They want everything very detailed. But just for today's illustration, I chose the USDA budget form and have laid it out similar to that form. So, one other thing I wanted to mention before we get started is make sure that you, your budget narrative is formatted like your project narrative. Make sure you pay attention to margins, font size, spacing, all of that. Again, you want it to be easy to read. This is probably going to be one of the last things that reviewers read. And so, you want it to be easy. They can click down the list, look at the costs and get a good idea for it. So, make sure that you pay attention to the formatting requirements of the sponsoring agency. So, let's start with salaries. For this proposal, there aren't any, there's no PI salary or full PI salary. There's graduate students. It states briefly what it is they'll be doing. Same with the undergraduate students indicating what they're doing. I've indicated the hourly rate because I know USDA has come back and asked us for that from time to time. I would avoid including a lot of calculations like 20 hours and $10 an hour equals X amount because it's too cumbersome to make sure, well, first of all, that they're absolutely correct. And then, too, if you have to go back and change something, then you have to remember to change it here and change it there and it gets, I would really just avoid that. And with the budget form with grants.gov, for salaries, it's already indicated on the form. How much time is being spent on the project? So, there's no need to duplicate that in the budget narratives. So, keep it kind of clean and keep it clear and succinct. I've included money for a research technician indicating that a 3% salary increase is included in each of them. And just a short paragraph on fringe benefits and how they're computed. There again, there's no need to itemize those specifically because they are included, they are itemized in the budget form itself. Equipment, there again. This is one sentence. I suppose we could have had maybe a bit more on this, but I think that it's fine the way it is. Travel, travel needs to be kind of like that just because there's a lot of different costs being included in travel. I like to just include the basis for your costs. For instance, I've put motor pool at 34 cents per mile. Meals $30 a day and lodging $70 a night. That indicates that those are the base, that's the basis for your costs. And there again, there's no need to break it down by year because that's broken down by year on the budget form. Attend national professional meeting, that's pretty much a standard inclusion for all Grants.gov budgets. There again, I think it's just make it real simple. Attend one to two regional meetings just to indicate how much it is per trip. A lot of times for USDA grants, they will say you are required to attend a PI meeting. Please budget funds for this. I'd like to have that separated. That way they know that you have specifically budgeted to attend that meeting. And just give a total for the travel. You don't want plane tickets broken down in Miley. I mean, you don't want all of that for those national meetings. You just want one light-eyed event so this is what the trip's gonna cost. Right, I like it broken down to say the airfare will cost $600 meals so much, but you don't need to say three days, three nights. Unless they specifically say to do that and sometimes with different programs within USDA, they will. So there again, it all gets back to following the instructions. Materials and supplies. I like to have people group like supplies together as you can see here. Rather than having one big long paragraph where everything is just listed, this is a project that involves quite a diverse set of supplies, everything from the nurse sampling to agronomy supplies to lab supplies. But I think that it's sufficient to group like supplies together and give a total for each. Publications for this one, there wasn't any, oh, there is for extension materials. As I said, it's fine to include publication costs for publishing your results of your work or your research or your extension work. The results of the project, that's what belongs technically in this category. Printing most appropriately belongs on a blank line in the other direct costs category, you would say printing of workshop materials or something like that. If it turns out that you need that line for something else, it's fine to put the printing for the workshop materials with the publications. Oh, and would you ever have them put printing or something like that in instructional supplies and put it up with materials and supplies? Are you talking about not? If they're printing for a workshop or whatever, would you put that in instructional supplies and then put it up in the materials and supplies in just a line up in that justification in the narrative? That would be when they're using like the NDSU budget form because the Grants.gov form doesn't have a specific line for instructional materials and supplies, it's just materials and supplies. But would you think that that could be in materials and supplies or not really? No. It's other, it's considered either. It's other or it's publications. I would say it fits more closely with publications than it does with materials and supplies. I always think that materials and supplies is a consumable, something that you can tangible that you buy and use out that you basically don't want to say consumed, but that it's a material thing that you're purchasing. Okay, now to the other direct costs or fees, which is probably my very least favorite thing to deal with because it's, that's where everything else that doesn't have a category falls into. So these are typically itemized because that's what USDA has always wanted us to do. And so you can see there's a fair amount of detail for the different types of supplies. And there again, I've tried to group somewhat similar fees together. I know that soil samples are a lot different probably than nurse samples, but they're all samples that are sent away to a lab to have some analysis done and give results back. The fees that are showing up under other fees are completely different than the others, carcass grading and trucking fees don't fit at all with the other ones. And so that's why they're separated here. And score the grants about budget form. And I wish I had a bigger monitor. I could have a form with the budget narrative, but it just, it's not enough for all of that. You would have, you should ideally have these on two separate lines and you could just label it as lab analysis fees on the blank line and then below bank could have other fees. And then of course it's explained in the budget narrative what the other fees are. And indirect costs. Normally you don't need to include an explanation of indirect costs if you're using the rate that is specified by USDA because they're already telling you that's what you should use. And so I wouldn't even recommend addressing that because sometimes people will put in language that isn't correct. They'll say this is NDSU's rate when in fact it's not NDSU's rate, it's USDA's rate. So if you're using the USDA rate just you don't need to address it. And they say that in their guidelines too that that's not something that you need to address. For this project I have, it turned out I indicated that it would be using NDSU's federally approved rate on modified total direct costs. Now, when I think about it I'm not sure that that's exactly the right calculation but I wanted to put that language in there so that you could see how that garbage, how you should, how you should work that. Any questions so far? The thing that they should or shouldn't put a definition of an indirect cost is that it doesn't do so. They shouldn't if they're using the rate that is specified by USDA. You can, I mean I'm saying that you shouldn't. It's just that you don't need to because they have already specified this is the rate you will use. So unless you're using something different there's no need to explain it. USDA application on the grant sector that application here is a line on their burden. Right, and if you're using the USDA rates I would recommend that you just type in total federal funds and then put in the percentage that's specified in the RFP. Okay, here's an example of another budget narrative that is perhaps more typical of an extension project. There's PI salary. They're again just a short explanation of what the person is doing. 3% salary increase has been budgeted each year. Support for graduate students. There again there's no, I haven't included a number here because the number of graduate students has already seen it in full form. There's no need to duplicate that. And as long as we're talking about salary make sure that the amount of effort that you show on your budget form is, let me just reward this, the amount of effort that you show on your current and pending support form needs to be greater than or equal to the amount that's on the budget form. You don't want your current pending support form to show less effort than what you're requesting salary for that'd be a big problem. So that's just something to remember. Graduate students, undergrad students. I know sometimes people have trouble converting. People are paid on an hourly basis to funded work months because you're thinking of someone on a part-time hourly basis. Well, how does that transfer to the months? Which is what you have to insert on the grants.gov budget form. I've included a little calculation there to show that to you. I'm not gonna go through it now because I know Breeze got to get on board here with her. She's got some good spreadsheets for everybody to use. They're again, equipment. Equipment is explain, PV, travel. Can I have another question? Can you go back up to how you calculate the months because we can't see it back here. So how did you decide to calculate the months for the students? Just, there were five students. They were 10 hours per week. That's 50 hours a week, 50 times 52 weeks. I know they're not really working 52 hours a week but just for the ease of computation, I used 52 hours. That's 2,500 hours. Well, there's 2,080 working hours in a year. So just divided that comes up to 1.21 years which is the equivalent of 14.4. They don't know? And India's students graduate students get their tuition paid. A lot of universities, they don't. So you don't think it's necessary to say how much for a graduate student? I mean, for their stipend? Yeah, for your pain there, what are you paying? An hour of wage? Graduate students' stipends I think are in Europe as many year-long. So like some universities, you might have to pay graduate students $50,000 because they have to pay for their tuition too. Do you not think that's necessary to explain it? And the issue, we don't have to do it. I don't know, we've never done it. That's not to say. I've reviewed a lot of grants where they ask for a fortune for a graduate because they have to pay a lot of tuition. If we, and we can, we haven't, we just started including tuition on grants now and so if someone wants to include it in the USD and NFA grant, they can certainly do that. And I believe the appropriate place to do that is under other direct costs. There's a blank line. You would just type in graduate students' tuition. Just be sure to identify it, identify the listifications, like if you find it because you don't collect it or a concept. And also make sure that the tuition is an allowable expense because there are some sponsors that don't pay it. I think that I understood your question correctly as well. We, from Sponsor for Grants, have discouraged putting in that tuition waiver language into the budget narrative because what that does is that even though we know that the institution is paying that tuition cost, if you write it into the budget narrative, then it becomes a required cost share which is trackable. So if you find that for a particular program that you have to somehow, you know, identify it, then we ask for a very generic language that would not be dollar value specific. So then as an institution, you're not required to track it. And that was another thing I was going to mention is if matching funds are not required, keep the language in your budget narrative. Refer, make sure that you're only referring to the costs that you are requesting. Because as Amy said, if you even just mentioned the PI is not collecting salary but will spend 10% of his time on the project, that's cost share. So by trying to explain something, you have just obligated yourself to 10% of that person's time being spent on the project and documented. That's not something that we want to voluntarily do. Here again, there's travel. I've indicated 36 cents per mile, the amount. National meetings for both project, well, project director, project director is depending on one year, one director may go, another year, both of them may go. Again, I've inserted language about attending an AFRI project director's meeting. Travel for student teachers. Okay, other direct costs. These costs are a little bit different than the costs in the other budget narrative. I've done it to more detail here because if I would have just put in $42,300 for supply kits, you would have no idea what it is. So I've detailed a little bit. Paper, products, folders, markers, feeds for 225 children and participating in the during school program and 360 children in the after school 4-8th program. There again, classroom materials are kind of self-explanatory. One thing is to be used to evaluate physical activity levels. Backpacks and millboards for productive training students. Project resource materials will be purchased and inserted into binders. When it comes to supplies, some of them that I've seen in the past, there's just been too much detail in what you're buying. They'll say, I need 50 binders at $3.50 each and I'll need, I can't even think of it now, but all kinds of different items that are very itemized and you really want to stay away from that. Publications, I've included an extension bulletin being produced in years three and four from journal articles expected in years three and four. A subaward detail, how much it is each year. Just give the bottom line for the subawards, not necessary to indicate that there's a difference between direct or indirect costs for your subaward. It's the bottom line that that institution is receiving. And here again, with the other costs, professional services, graphic designer fees, how many hours, so much per hour, so much per year in total. Conference calls, cost of one, conference calls of eight partners each month will be $48 a month, $576 a year. Advisory Board travel costs. Now this is one area where people get hung up and I can certainly understand why. At NDSU, non-employee travel is not paid as a travel cost, it's paid as a fee. And so the logical thing would be to put it under travel and I honestly think that's where it should go, but our account codes aren't set up like that. So it has to go, it should go, most appropriately go on your other, that's how the expense gets paid. There again, I've explained that we're using NDSU's federally-improved rate of 38.1% of modified total direct costs. Well one of you said nine, employee travel should go under the other department. And if that comes up in the grant later and we need to change that, then that needs to go like a budget provision. When you say change, why would you? All of a sudden they've decided that they do need to pay some of their non-employee travel for a speaker to come in or something like that. So you're saying you would be budgeting from travel for NDSU employees to come on in NDSU employees? Yes. Well there again, it depends on the funding agency and how strict they are with moving money between categories. If it was a USDA and Infigrant, you would not need to do that, but there again, if you're unsure, I would contact the grants office, whoever in the grants office is handling your grant, explain the situation to them, ask them, and you need to get sponsored approval. Okay, maybe we have sponsored approval, though there isn't too much of an NDSU and other than talking to our grants first. Well, if you need to make a budget, if they determine that you do have to have sponsored approval, you need to run that request through sponsored programs. Just send an email to Amy and Marie or anyone, explain your situation and they'll take care of it. Sometimes we've had funders who will give us an email message that says, for this particular grant, you have permission to move those line items as needed. And that's a one-time email that we've got on file and attached and we make changes and we don't have to continually do that for every change. So depending upon who you're working with, that's really nice if they'll do that. Well, I think we'll wrap it up. Marie's got some great budget worksheets for everyone. I think she's gonna demonstrate those next. Can you share those budget items? Sure. I think definitely, you know. And then we'll see other things, all the people on that side of the room do not receive it right now. Oh, a little drink, that sounds okay, I'm sure. Well, I think I have about maybe three or four minutes to talk here fast. I think I'm going to do, first as I understand it, there may be a lot of confusion with match, so I tried to put together a budget that may or may not help you, but it will hopefully help you. And you can also use this one without match if you want to, but if I've got it started here you would start down on the bottom on this tab where it says salary. And if you have, let's say PIX, Y and Z, I don't know what their name is, let's say John Doe, and you want to calculate in an escalation rate for the year, for following years of your salary, say 4%, 3%, whatever you think the rates may be, you would put that percentage in here. This is your base monthly salary, let's say it's 2,000, and then how many months of salary are you requesting from your sponsor? Let's say two months, okay? And so then you're requesting $4,000 from your sponsor, and how much of that do you need to make as match? Like I say, you can use this with match or without by either leaving this column, column I here, either blank or put something in. Let's say you want to match $500 of that salary. It has to be matched. This is only if it's a required match for me, we're not going to match it unless something's required. Okay, and I've got a cost for each year on this one that I've completed here just because I don't have a lot of time. I've done one for year two, three, four, and five. And over on this side, it will total what you're requesting for each person from the sponsor and how much of that you're going to match. Down below, it will total by salary requested for faculty, for all faculty by year, how much in total on match to get you all the way down here. I'm sorry, I'm having to rush on this, but. Then I also put it in for post-docs because that's another one that a lot of times you have to put in a certain percent of their time, their effort to be made after match. So post-docs, research associates, so we've got your senior personnel, your faculty, and then your other staff that would be included on your budget did not put for graduate students in on this. Then those figures, well, feed over, if you click on the second column here, the budget here's one to five. All those fields calculate and they calculate your fringe benefits and goes across by year from the sponsor and the match. You can change your fringe benefit rate. Anything in yellow you can change. Say you want 16% of your fringe benefits. You can change that and it'll recalculate for you. So that's that information, that's what you find on your website? It will be. I wanted to wait until we did this seminar to see if there's anything else that people may want. And it does sound like maybe you're having a little bit of, would like a little more detail between publications and printing so we could add those categories for you. As Amy had talked about and Oana had talked about, we are starting to include tuition if you want the grant to pay the tuition for the student, for the graduate student. So I've got a separate line here where you can put whatever amount you want. That tuition, I mean, it's got to be whatever the university would normally pay. It's, say, 20,000. That will calculate all the way across the entire year. And I'm sorry, this screen doesn't roll out all the way over here so you can see the cumulative over on this side. So we've got the sponsor, the match, sponsored match for each year all the way across. And then over here it will add that all the way across by what we're requesting from the sponsor and what you're matching. And then give you the total cumulative of everyone. And I keep tuition separate because if we are using our negotiated rate, we don't collect indirect costs on that. And then your travel line. So you have your travel, your material supplies, postage printing repairs. And again, if there are fields in there or categories that would make it easier for you, let me know and we can try to incorporate some of that in. I tried to follow people sought when you get a budget, when you're awarded an award, they kind of have certain categories. And that's what I'm trying to follow in naming the categories here. Then let's say you've got a subcontract of, say, 10,000 the first year. And I didn't put matching in on that because you're more than likely not going to use a subcontract as a match. Then say 5,000 the next year. This will calculate your indirects on that until it reaches 25K because we only collect the first 25K of each subcontract. So those formulas are in there. So for instance, this one you've already collected 25 and I clicked another 10,000 for the second year of funding. That won't change your indirect costs right down here. Yes. The institution that we're working with with the subcontract already calculates their indirect. This is over and above. Yes, this is NPSU's indirect cost rate. We collect on the first 25,000 of any subcontract. And that covers the administrative part of managing the subcontract. It's in our indirect cost rate. That's why we only collect on the first 25,000 of any subcontract. We don't collect on that. The figure that this 10,000 right here, that would already include the indirects that the person that you're giving the subcontract to, that would include their subcontracts already in that figure. Yes. In engineering, we have fabrications. So where it will go in this? Fabrications on ours, it would depend if it's going to be a capitalized one. Or it's small fabrications because we design new things. You're just designing something that's not meant to be a piece of capitalized equipment. One time used. Then you would put most of your costs and come under the materials if you're building like a prototype. Yes. Yeah, okay. Then we have brands and leases. We have expendable equipment, which is equipment that costs less than $5,000. It's sort of like materials. You're going to use it up. It doesn't have a long life. And we have operating fees, which I would think of as like, if you're using tools to calibrate something and you have to pay a lab on campus or you have to send it off, that would be a fee. I think you're using agricultural fees like testing fees. Then professional fees would be, examples of that would be if you're doing a, instead of a subcontract, let's say you've got a consultant that you're hiring. That would go under your professional fees and services. It'd be more of a consultant or a vendor rather than a subcontract. Or they have some, a subcontract, they have to have some part of the research responsibility for the research. It's not just they're just doing their testing or something like that, that wouldn't be a subcontract. And then your other expenses would be like, on ahead, where it's anything else that doesn't fit. Okay, so you've got your total operating expenses calculated here for this particular year. And then there's different ways that you could be asked to calculate your indirect costs. For example, if we're using our regular negotiated rate, indirect cost rate that NDSU has, then you would choose this one right here that says FNAs and NDSU's negotiated rate schedule. And then that, then you come down here and whatever the rate, like if it's off campus, you could change this to 38.1 and it will recalculate your indirects. If you're using something other than NDSU's negotiated rate, you would click on this second one. For example, foundation may only pay 10% indirect costs. So then you could change this percentage to 10 and you would want to click the second line here that says not using our negotiated rate and that will recalculate your indirect set. And if you're using something less than our negotiated indirect cost rates, it's going to collect on everything, not just what's allowable with our negotiated rate, like it could collect on 100% of your subcontract. You would be collecting on tuition. And we have to use whichever would be the lease, either on total costs or on our negotiated rate, whichever rate is going to work out to be the lesser of the two, depending on, I mean, if your agency allows 10% and then you have a lot of subcontracts in there, it could come out to be costing more than using our negotiated rate than we would have to use our negotiated rate instead. If you're using for USDA grants and say they will only allow 30% based on the total cost, which is your direct costs and your indirects together, put that 30% down here and then click on this total. It's based on the total requested. And then that will calculate your indirects for you already. Then if you, instead of giving us this, this is a five year budget and if you wanted to, then have it more summarized, I've got it so that it will feed in this third sheet here. Calculate, brings all of those over and shows you in summary form then what is your requested fund, your matching fund, your total project. And I also did back on this second sheet here. Because a lot of times we could be using a rate, I don't have a good example here now, but we're not using our negotiated rate and you do have to show match for this project. One of the things you could show is your unrecovered indirect costs as match if the agency allows it. So I've done a calculation just in case you need to use that. I calculated what your unrecovered indirect costs would be. Don't have to use that. It's just there for your use. If you need to use it as matching, it's calculated for you. And what that is, is it's the difference between our negotiated rate and what the agency allows. That's all that calculation is. So then here's the summary match again. And we also have other budget sheets out here, but I don't really have time to go into any of those. Other questions, this was really, really fast. So right after, right after there's anything else that people would like to see included in the budget. You have printing, so would we assume publications going up there? Well, on our form, yes. And that was one of the things that I've heard as you were talking up here, that that seems to be a confusing point. So if there are other categories that would be helpful to you, let me know and we can have you all see on the screen. On the renting of leases, does that include land leasing, renting, tractors, hotel rooms? If you're renting, I don't know why you'd be renting a hotel room, I mean, travel or- Does your expansion hazard use a hotel conference room? Oh, sure, like a room like this. So if there are other categories that you need or you'd like to see that would be helpful, send us an email and we can add them before we post this for you. And I know this was really, really fast. I'm sorry about that. And there are other calculating tools on their website so that we should take some time to- We have a simple one-year budget and then we have another one similar to this that doesn't have matching. And then this one, I just put the matchups. But the big thing with this one is remember start with your salary first and then go to the, because they keep feeding all the way. Okay, I'll do that. Let Amy talk quickly here.