This section outlines Budget Basics and the processfor creating a budget within GRAMS.
During the proposal development process, the Principal Investigator (PI) and/or departmental administrator will create the proposal budget in GRAMS. The budget is associated with the Funding Proposal (FP) and will be routed and reviewed along with the Funding Proposal.
The PI and/or department admin will navigate to the budget, complete the budget SmartForm, and upload the budget justification. If needed, multiple budgets can be created for the proposal.
What are Direct Costs?
Direct costs are items that can be directly charged to the grant, including:
What are Indirect Costs?
Indirect costs are items that “include those things essential to support sponsored activities that cannot be specifically identified and directly charged or attributable to a particular research grant or contract”. Examples include heating and cooling the building where the research is done and building maintenance.
Indirect costs have a few names and abbreviations; they all mean the same thing:
What is UNT Indirect Costs(IDC)?
Sponsor may have published IDC limitation that may need to be followed (i.e.: 0%, 10%) instead of using UNT’s negotiated rates listed above.
What do MTDC & TDC mean?
MTDC stands for Modified Total Direct Costs
TDC stands for Total Direct Cost
Most personnel items have associated fringe benefits costs which are known by a few different names and abbreviations; they mean the same thing:
UNT’s FB rates changes every year. UNT has established an average Fringe Benefit rate to use for proposal budget development. An average fringe benefit rate is set for the below 3 categories of employees. Current Fringe Benefit Rates to use for proposal budgets can be found on the VPRI Website here.