Part IV - Charge-out rates

Section G: Other Charge-out rates

1. Directly allocated costs, such as estates, are costs of services used by a project, where the services are shared by other activities and projects. The project’s use of the service is estimated (e.g. in terms of units of time), and a standard charge-out rate per unit is applied to arrive at a directly allocated cost for that project.
2. Two types of cost – laboratory technicians and major research facilities – can remain part of estates costs until 1 August 2007, but should then be directly allocated to projects. Charge-out rates (e.g. expressed as £ per FTE, or £ per hour of facility usage) are used to do this.
3. Academic staff costs are also directly allocated costs applied to projects using daily charge-out rates – see Part V  Chapter C.3.
4. Where a cost is allocated directly to research projects, this method should be used for all activities and projects – no part of that cost should be included in the indirect cost rate nor included in another directly allocated cost such as estates.
5. Directly allocated costs should be recorded against the project during its life. The standard charge-out rate, used to estimate costs of a project pre-award, would give the amount to be recorded.
6. Records of overall use of each facility should be kept at a level that will provide information for calculating the charge-out rates. However, records of actual usage by project need not be maintained, even though it is good practice for a system to record this as they provide good records to use for estimating future years’ utilisation (and, therefore, increase the robustness of charge-out rate calculations). If actual usage on each project is recorded, then the estimated charge on those projects could be amended to reflect their actual usage. This should only be done where this is considered practical and material, and is not too onerous a task in practice. Subsequent years’ charge-out rates or changes (due to differences between estimated and actual costs or utilisation) need not be recorded under TRAC (updated rates will not form the basis of funding by most sponsors).
7. This section focuses on charge-out rates used to cost research projects; however, the same principles and techniques could be used for Teaching and Other activities.
8. The first chapter focuses on laboratory technicians, but could also be applied to clerical staff.