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| Application Details |
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| Cost Proposal System |
The College of Engineering is a research-intensive academic unit. Each year the college conducts tens of millions of dollars in sponsored research. This figure represents a significant funding source for the College because in addition to direct research costs such as salaries and equipment, sponsoring agencies contribute funding in support of indirect costs such as fringe benefits and overhead. These indirect costs contribute money to the operational budgets of the college and the university to fund instruction, construction, and support programs. In 1989, the Dean for Graduate Studies and Research (OGSR) indicated that he wished to automate the generation of budgetary submissions of sponsored research projects.
Prior to 1989, budget preparation was extremely time consuming and required specialized knowledge of institutional policies and reporting requirements of sponsoring agencies. For these reasons, researchers relied almost entirely upon centralized staff of the OGSR to prepare and format their research budget submissions.
Each budget submission may include line items for faculty salary(s), stipends an/or tuition for graduate assistants, research fellows, research technicians, office supplies, equipment, computer support, design support, consultants, etc. University policies apply different fringe benefit and overhead rates to these line items. In addition, inclusion of a line item may initiate the inclusion of another line item that may also incur fringe and/or overhead charges.
Many research efforts span multiple years. Most of the charges alluded to above change from year to year and incur fringe and overhead rates that vary from year to year. Faculty receive raises, tuition rates go up, certain charges apply to only the first year of a multi-year contract while other charges are allowed only up to a fixed dollar limit. These charges and inflation factors are sensitive to four different years to include calendar year, fiscal year, budget year and academic year.
CPSII reduced initial budget preparation from several hours to several minutes. Once completed budgets often required changes at the direction of the sponsor; prior to the availability of CPSII these changes took nearly as long to complete as the initial budget.
In addition to creating budgetary submissions, this software also produces exact replicas of sponsoring agency(s) forms, place budgetary data on these forms, and print these forms. Nearly all research intensive organizational units at Penn State use this software.
The Cost Proposal System is a polished application that has added tremendous value to the research community at Penn State. |
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