BU Research Blog

This week is fEC week on the Blog! Each day we will be explaining a different element of fEC as a quick reference guide to help you prepare the budgets for your research proposals. Today’s focus is on Directly Allocated costs.

See Friday’s blog post (Introduction to full economic costing) for an explanation of what fEC actually is and why we use it.

Step 3 – Directly Allocated (DA) costs

Directly allocated (DA) costs are the costs of resources on a project where the same resources are shared by other activities and projects. Directly allocated costs are different to directly incurred costs because the costs are not exclusively related to any one individual project.

DA costs are charged to the project based upon an estimate, rather than actual cash values.

Examples of DA costs include:

• Principal Investigator (PI) and co-Investigator (Co-I) salary costs
• Estates costs

Investigator salary costs – yesterdays fEC post explained how to estimate the time that the PI and Co-Is will need to spend on the project in terms of average hours per week. This will now need to be used to calculate the salary cost of each of the Investigators on the project.

You will need to know, for each Investigator, the average hours per week they will devote to the project and the CRE Operations team will then use BU’s costing software to apply these hours to the appropriate salary banding in order to calculate a project salary cost for each Investigator.

Please note that if you have an investigator who is going to be 100% funded from the project (such as Research Fellowships) then this cost should be included as directly incurred, as these staff will need to be charged as actual costs to the project. 

Estate costs – these are a directly allocated cost but will be included in tomorrow’s post as the process for calculating estates and indirect costs is the same.

See tomorrow’s blog post on indirect costs for the next exciting installment of fEC!