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Direct Costs Other Than Salaries
Treat as direct costs:
- laboratory supplies (e.g., chemicals)
- telephone toll charges
- and other project-specific communication costs
- laboratory animals
- animal care costs
- computing costs
- travel costs
- specialized shop costs
Consumable supplies
Treat consumable supplies as direct costs if it can be demonstrated that such supplies are used only in the conduct of the project, are not used for other purposes, and are consumed completely in the course of the project. If used only for project purposes, items such as laboratory supplies and materials, lab notebooks, diskettes, transparencies, printer paper for research data and reports, report binders, and so forth are justified as consumable supplies. However, when such items are purchased to support the multiple activities of project personnel, they are considered office supplies and cannot be charged directly to federal funds. Such items would include University stationary, pens, tablets, file folders, staples, paper clips, and so forth.
Telephone line charges
These can be made against federal project funds only where the line can be shown to be completely dedicated to a project or set of closely interrelated projects. Telephone line charges to interrelated projects must be pro-rated on some defensible basis. Toll charges are allowable if some mechanism is in place to ensure that such calls are charged to the projects to which they are directly related.
Postage costs
Postage, including the cost of courier services, should be budgeted to federal projects only where there is an extraordinary need for postage, such as mailed surveys, which can be justified explicitly in the budget explanation submitted to the sponsoring agency.
Computer Costs
Hardware, software, personnel services, public access sites, and other related costs required to enable University personnel to share software or data or to communicate electronically with other individuals, are considered to be part of the physical infrastructure of the University and are classified as Plant Operation and Maintenance expenses (i.e., indirect costs).
However, individual workstations and specialized hardware and software attached to the network, which are not available to all users, are not included as part of the network costs. These items may be treated as direct costs and recovered from sponsored projects through the use of approved recharge rates. In situations where total costs are not recovered through the recharges for computing services and facilities that are not part of the network costs, the subsidy must be identifiable and should be treated as a direct cost of the same activities which were charged.
The appropriateness of these types of costs as direct charges to a particular sponsored project must be based on a "facts and circumstances" test which considers the needs of science. Such judgment, therefore, can best be made by the Project Director or Principal Investigator.
In most cases, these expenditures should be anticipated and explicitly shown in the project budget. Agency approval will be assumed if these costs are budgeted and are not specifically denied in the notice of award or in related correspondence from the agency to the University.
Where the need to incur such costs has not been anticipated and therefore, not included in the project budget, consult with the appropriate DRDA Project Representative before direct charging these costs to a federal grant or contract.
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