Posted by SkylightGrantWriters on 1/15/2009, 2:23 pm
Hi all - I have a budget question that is making my head hurt and hope to get some feedback.
The foundation we are approaching has a very simple budget template they want used - expenses and revenues. No guidelines on what they want to see on the revenue side.
The item for which we are seeking funding is an ultrasound machine. The only capital expense is the cost of the machine.
Radiology Dept tells me that they will receive gross revenues of $1700 per ultrasound study with the new machine. However, in thinking about it, they will incur staff costs to use the new machine - it's not like they have ultrasound techs sitting around idle - doubling their ultrasound study capabilities with the new machine will require doubling their ultrasound tech staff count.
Initially I was going to include the new gross revenues on the "revenues" side of the proposal budget but now I am second-guessing myself. I see three options:
1. Include the revenues from u/s studies, and offset that in the Expenses section with the new staff expense. But this seems muddy to me because now I am mixing capital expenses with operating expenses. Do those operating expenses necessarily need to be part of the grant proposal? The hospital will absort the staff costs out of their operating budget.
2. Do an adjusted (net) profit number in the Revenues section, reducing for staff costs, which allows me to honestly report the true revenues without complicating the expenses section.
3. Don't include revenues at all, and just keep the expenses section to the cost of the new machine. That makes it more like the project is simply the purchase of the machine and nothing else. I hesitate to go with this because the new machine will help the hospital's bottom line, and because we do have a lot of measurement and "program management" we are doing with the new machine including serving lots of new patients, etc. So it would be natural to associate revenues as a goal/target with the new purchase.
Thanks for wading through this. I may be overthinking it but I have an obsessive need to make sure my budgets are always straight-arrow so I don't want to not address something I should be.
