The budget for a sponsored project is the financial expression of the costs necessary to complete a project or program as approved during the award process. Budget revision or rebudgeting is a reallocation of funds from one spending category to another category. Sponsors may or may not require prior approval for budget revisions, and/or may provide thresholds that require prior approval (either by a percentage of the budget or an amount of deviation by budget category or line item).

Requesting Budget Revision

Principal Investigator (PI) should work with their Local Research Administrator (LRA) to determine if routing of the internal Budget Revision Form is necessary.

Routing of the completed Budget Revision Form is only required when:

• Prior approval is required from the sponsor, including a change in the scope of work associated with the budget revision
• Requested budget changes result in decrease of F&A over $5,000.

If the Budget Revision Form is needed, it should be signed by the PI and routed by the LRA to the Pre-Award point of contact. In instances where a reduction in the F&A amount is greater than $2,500, the Authorized Official at the PI’s School / Center must also sign the request before it is sent to Pre-Award. Please note that HNRCA must sign all requests in all instances where there is a reduction in F&A for any amount.

Calculations for F&A Impact

Budget revisions impact Facilities and Administration (F&A) costs when amounts are rebudgeted to or from the following budget categories that do not generate F&A:

• Capital Equipment ≥ $5000
• Tuition
• Subawards (over the first $25,000 of each subaward)
• Participant Support Costs
• Rental costs of off-site facility.

If a given budget revision transfers money from a non-F&A bearing budget item (such as equipment) to an F&A bearing item (such as materials), the F&A dollar amount will increase. (See Example 1)

Example 1: An award has a capital equipment budget of $10,000 and an F&A rate of 56%. If only $8,000 was spent on equipment, and the remaining $2,000 will be spent on other materials. The $2,000 balance in equipment will need to be rebudgeted between materials and F&A since the materials purchases will generate F&A. In this scenario, $1,282 would be added to materials and $718 would be added to F&A ($1,282 + $718 = $2,000).

If the budget revision transfers money from an F&A bearing budget item (such as materials) to a non F&A bearing budget item (such as equipment), the F&A dollar amount will decrease. (See Example 2)

Example 2: An award has a capital equipment budget of $10,000 and an F&A rate of 56%. If $12,000 was spent on equipment a budget revision would need to reduce the F&A dollar amount since the additional $2,000 spent on equipment does not generate F&A. In this scenario, the F&A budget would be reduced by $1,120 (56% of $2,000) that would be re allocated to the equipment budget.

Contact Post-Award for assistance with budget revision calculations.

Processing Budget Revision

Requests for budget revision that do not require prior agency approval will be expeditiously routed to Post-Award for processing in RAS/PeopleSoft.

If prior sponsor approval is required, Pre-Award will contact the sponsor on behalf of the PI and obtain such approval. Once the sponsor approval is received, Pre-Award will route to Post-Award the Budget Revision Form together with a copy of any applicable approval from the agency. After they are processed by Post-Award, budget revisions are reflected in Data Warehouse on the following day.