Lenora Williams: Posted on Thursday, June 23, 2011 6:13 PM

What are the essential budget ingredients?

A budget template:

1. You must think about indirect costs. Another way to describe indirect cost is Administrative Overhead (what it takes in dollars to administer the funds).

Indirect cost/Administrative overhead - A simple formula,without detailing all of your administrative cost and creating a percentage of that detailed cost for each grant received, is to take an average of 15% of your total funding source revenue and budget that amount for indirect cost.This is an acceptable practice as long as you are consistently using the above formula for all of your funding sources. Most federal grants will require that you use a federal indirect cost rate which has a special format and the indirect rate established is adjusted and reviewed annually by the federal Department of Health & Human services. Follow this link for further instructions http://rates.psc.gov.

2. Direct Salary cost for the program (administration salaries are covered in the above indirect cost/administrative overhead amount)- List each salary position that will work on the grant. Identify the base salary amount (formula: hourly rate X the # of hours worked per week X the number of weeks worked for the length of the grant). List each position by title and the base salary associated with the position. One full-time equivalent (FTE) for a 40 hour work week for one year (52 weeks – 2080 hours) is equal to 1.0 FTE.

Fringe benefits - to simplify the process (this is not a best practice) of calculating fringe benefits, you would take a percent range of 20 - 26% of the total direct salary cost and that times the total salary equals the fringe benefit amount. Most funders want more detail. The fringe benefits are comprised of the following categories: payroll taxes, both state and federal; worker's compensation, health care, and retirement cost. Each one of the fringe benefit categories should have a calculated percentage that in total should equal but not exceed the 20 - 26% range.

Add direct salary cost andfringe benefit cost to equal the total personnel cost for the grant.

3. Template for standard budget line items, there are more possibilities. However, the line items listed below reflect the majority of line items used in most grant budgets. Please add or remove budget line items that do not fit your grant:

Travel -- Mileage, transportation, ...

Training -- Instructors, registration, ...

Supplies -- Office and program supplies (their line items can be separated)

Advertising -- Classified adds,event listings,...

Printing &Duplicating -- Copying handouts, brochures, ...

Rent/Lease -- Office rent

Janitorial -- Cleaning services

Incentives -- Client incentives

Equipment Purchase -- computers, faxes ...

Equipment lease -- lease copiers

Building maintenance & repairs -- Office repairs

Communications -- Telephone, faxes, cell phones

Utilities -- garbage, water, electricity, gas

Insurance -- Liability,D&O, auto ...

Fund raising -- Rent booth ...

Memberships -- professional organizations that are program related

Educational supplies -- videos, books, ...