You have met with the Sponsored Programs Specialist for your college, and agreed on the table of contents of your proposal based on the guidelines within the funding announcement. The proposal has been signed off by your department head and all necessary resources gathered – time to develop your budget! To plan all the needed resources, you must have a clear picture of the number and types of resources needed to complete the budget or you will encounter difficulties in writing the budget justification.

Budget amount

Here are six suggestions to ensure that your budget fits the work detailed in the proposal and not have a problem in justifying each line item.

1. Defining resources – People and equipment

So far you have articulated clearly what your proposal will be doing based on the research, the expected outcomes and how to get to those outcomes, but how much money are you expecting the proposal to cost and over what length of time? Having an accurate idea of the skill-set of people required on the project and equipment if any, are an important criteria otherwise reviewers are going to see padding in the numbers and the money being requested.

2. Scheduling of resources – Time-line

You have all your resources (people and equipment) identified and now you have to calculate time and availability of people. Have you ensured that persons have the permission of their department head as well as time based on their commitments to other projects? What about the skill-set of these persons? Is it a strong fit for your project or are you adding persons because they are available or have received funding already from that agency? Be careful, as reviewers will identify the weaknesses and you will receive fewer points in the comments. Choose only persons who can provide sufficient time and provide strong skills to your project.

3. Always be realistic – Don’t pad the numbers!

Forget about requesting money for equipment because you “want it”, or because “everybody thinks your should have it”. You will have to justify the line item in the budget and being realistic about areas that can be achieved it a better fit than trying to pad your budget. For example, if you state that travel will be required to foreign countries to do surveys, ask yourself if electronic communication could not do the same with outside contractors, and leave travel for the presentation of your paper to an international body. Make sure to plan resources with some contingency amount (10% – 20% of total) to allow for those unexpected problems that will arise during your project.

4. Take the initiative – Do your part

Yes the Sponsored Research office and its personnel are there to support you in developing your proposal and calculating your budget, but don’t expect them to know the salary of personnel on the project. Supply the data! You need to travel by plane to various cities? Find out the cost of the plane fair, per diem costs for each day and the cost of the hotels. Supply the data! You don’t understand the fringe benefits and cost sharing and all the required data needed to complete the budget calculation? Meet with them and be a partner in completing the numbers. Remember they want to help but they need you to invest time and effort so that the entire proposal and budget can be completed and sent off before the deadline. Do your part!

5. Priorities – What is important

Changes to your project during the implementation will occur, so one has to prioritize and make quick decisions to correct or stabilize the project. This could have an impact on your deliverables or not; in either case always have an external evaluator who will be able to bring an unbiased perspective so that the project can stay on target.

6. Always Plan Ahead – Murphy’s Law

Show me a plan/project that goes according to plan and I will show you a proposal that always gets funded. Not possible! If within your project timeline you have an idea of the critical elements that will affect the completion of the project and other elements that will not affect your plan, then you have strong control of what matters. So planning ahead is a great idea especially when collaboration between persons and institutions is vital to the success of the project.

Quote: (Author unknown)

“When working on a project, if you put away a tool that you’re certain you’re finished with, you will need it instantly”