Video 10: Budget

Budget: Line-Item Budget and Budget Justification

This section will provide you with an overview of the Line-Item Budget, and Budget Justification

The budget consists of a line item budget and a narrative budget justification. The line item budget is a list of the resources and services required to complete the project and their associated costs which are organized by Object Class Categories. Additionally, the line item budget clearly identifies the Federal Share (the amount being requested from ANA); the Non-Federal Share (match/in-kind – the amount being contributed to the project by the applicant or applicant’s partners); as well as program income and indirect costs, when applicable. The budget justification narrative describes how each line item cost was calculated and includes a short explanation of why it is necessary to the project. ANA has budget templates available in the Application Toolkit which can be found on the website at https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ana/application-toolkit.

This is video 10 of the 2021 pre-application training videos developed by the Administration for Native Americans Regional Training and Technical Assistance Centers. I'm Drena McIntyre and I'm your trainer today. I'm with the Alaska Region Training and Technical Assistance Center. The Alaska Region Training and Technical Assistance Center offers free training and technical assistance to the 227 tribes and native nonprofits in the State of Alaska. You can reach us at www.anaalaska.org, or call 1800-948-3158. This video series introduces you to the basic concepts for preparing a 2021 ANA grant application to support your community-based project. There are 16 videos in this series and we suggest that you view them in sequence. This is video 10 of pre-application training, the line-item, budget, and budget justification forms. The budget portion of your ANA application should include both a line-item budget, and a budget narrative. It's recommended that you have your objective work plan in front of you when planning out the project budget. Include all costs needed to ensure the completion of all activities listed in your objective work plan. The application includes a line-item budget with appropriate object class categories for every year of the project that fully details the costs allocated for federal and non-federal shares. Personnel should be delineated by full-time equivalent or percentage of time to the project. The application includes funds for all required items to successfully implement the project budget as described in Section IV.2, content and form of application submission, the project budget and budget justification. Your line-item budget should only include costs that align with both your approach and your objective work plan. For the line-item budget you can get up to five points. Provide line by line all costs for all proposed project expenditures categorized by object class categories. And they include personnel, fringe benefits for those personnel, travel, equipment, supplies, contractual, other, direct costs, indirect costs, and total costs. You can see more information the line-item budget on pages 111 through 116 of your pre-app manual. We urge you to use the budget template. It is available in the 2021 application toolkit and it's recommended in the FOA to use this form. It aligns with required format and object class categories. There are two versions available of the line-item budget. One is for language grants and another for all other grant programs. Here's an example of the line-item budget. Again, you can go to pages 118 to 120 of the pre-app manual. You can see they've listed out personnel here. The project investigator, project director is one full-time equivalency at 55,000 that they're going to ask the federal government to fund. They have the agricultural coordinator at one full-time equivalency at 43,000 and an administrative assistant at one full-time equivalency at 25,000 for a total of 123,000 for the federal share for personnel. They've listed out all the necessary fringe benefits including FICA, FUTA, SUTA, Medicare and this cooperative pays health insurance at 10% for their employees, so that would be figured in as well. Every grantee once funded has to attend a post-award training. Your project director and finance officer or accountant needs to attend this training. It is a mandatory administrative costs that ANA requires. This usually happens within two months of your receiving your funding award. And this is only in year one. Also for all years of your grant ANA has an annual grantee meeting. And your project director and a coordinator or a staff person would go to that annual meeting. Usually happens in February and it usually happens in Washington DC. For the post award training, I'll backtrack a little, in Alaska it happens in Anchorage and like I said, usually within two months of your getting your award announcement. I just wanted to remind you here what ANA does not fund. So friendly reminder, we talked about it in the earlier videos, but I'll remind you again. ANA does not fund organized fundraising. That includes financial campaigns, endowment drives, solicitation of gifts and bequests and similar expenses incurred solely to raise capital or obtain contributions. This means you cannot fund a grant writer out of this money. You cannot fund reimbursement of pre-award costs. Anything before the start date of your project cannot be paid for from this money. You cannot fund construction or activities that qualify as major renovations or alterations. You cannot fund purchase of real property and you cannot fund activities in support of any foreseeable litigation against the US government. Here again is the personnel and fringe listing for the Pine Creek tribes project. And you can see so far they haven't put in their non-federal share which is a requirement at 20% of total project cost. So you need to start thinking about how you can come up with paying for 20% of the project cost. You can do that through in kind like rent, a half-time person working on the project from another fund, et cetera. You might have a partner that's gonna be paying for part of the project. That value can be used towards your match as well. And then listed travel. Again, the post-award training and ANA Grantee Meetings are both mandatory post award just in year one. ANA Grantee Meeting in all three years of your project unless you're Esther Martinez and that would be all five years. For equipment and supplies. Equipment should be 5,000 or more for the cost. You can see that, for example, they put greenhouses under equipment because they each cost $6,000 times four equal 24,000. So that would go in the equipment category. Office supplies is under 5,000. That would be 1500 and meeting supplies under 5,000 at 2000. So those would be put under supplies. For contractual you have contractors that are paying for video conferencing equipment. You're getting non-federal share for land lease for four sites. You're getting a training facility for 6,000, utilities that farms have a value for 2,380, tractor rental has value, grader rental, backhoe rental. All of these items can be used as non-federal share to build up that 20% total project cost match. And for your indirect costs most organizations have an agreement with the federal government on a negotiated indirect cost rate. And so, for example, they've put in their negotiated rate at 12.86% and they're asking federal share to help pay for that. We have something called a diminimous rate that is a flat rate of 10%. And ANA allows you to use the flat rate of 10% diminimous rate if you do not have a negotiated indirect cost rate agreement with the federal government. So if you want to include that, you can. And that indirect cost can help pay for keeping the doors open in your building, covering the light bill, fuel, rent, lease, et cetera. So you can see here they've added the direct costs from all of those categories was 279,134.60 and then the non-federal share was added in there. So that's a total direct cost of 357,904.60. They put in an indirect costs at 12.86% of that 279,134.60. And then the total project costs for year one is 315,031.31 plus the match of 78,770 for a total project costs for year one of 393,801.31. And you can see how it's broken up. 80%, 20% equals 100%. For the non-federal share calculations are built in. Even the non-federal share. Remember it is 20% of total project cost. So if your total project costs is 300,000, 20% of 300,000 is 60,000 for the non-federal share. And it is strongly recommended that you do not commit more than 20% for your non-federal share. The non-federal share is the resources provided by the applicant that are committed to the project. Your non-federal share can include cash, donated goods, or donated services. Generally speaking, your non-federal share cannot include funds from other federal agencies unless that agencies legislation specifically states that those funds can be used as non-federal share for other federal awards. The exceptions include the Indian Self-Determination Act 93-638 funds, the Indian Community Block Grant and Community Development Block Grant funds, the Indian Housing Block Grant funds, the Indian Employment and Training funds, and for ERE program grants specifically any federal funding source except ANA can be used. So keep those in mind. So make sure when you're building your line-item budget that you always look back at your OWP, have it on hand. Make sure that each activity you look at carefully and that you've allowed for enough costs to make sure that that activity can be carried out. And define which costs can you provide as non-federal share and that your costs are categorized in the correct standard object class category. In your budget justification the application includes a budget justification for every year of the project that provides a narrative that describes the breakdown of how all those costs are calculated for each entry in the line-item budget. The budget justification includes a basis for estimated costs, such as equipment, personnel and travel, there should be vendor quotes provided for any equipment that's over 5,000 and your budget justification describes how expenditures align with your approach and your objective work plan. Your application provides information or documentation to demonstrate the required commitment of non-federal share cost sharing or matching contributions. Use the budget justification template. It's available in your 2020 pre-application toolkit and it's the one that's recommended in your FOA as well. It aligns with the required format and object class categories. In your budget justification for personnel and fringe benefits make sure you include the following for each position in your description. The job title and the name of the person filling position if known, the time commitment to the project in months and full-time equivalency, a salary or hourly wage, a brief description of the responsibilities related to the project and a breakdown for each fringe benefit into percentages. There's more discussion about your budget justification on page 122 of your pre-app manual. Here is the Pine Creek tribes example of a budget justification. You can see how they broke it down. It's basically the formula on how they came up with that amount for personnel. And so, for example, the PI/PD at one full-time equivalency has a salary at 55,000 per year, which is 2080 hours is one FTE and that's at 26.44 an hour. That person is responsible for the oversight of staff, project reporting, compliance, and data collection. So it's very brief, but it's all there on how they came up with that amount. Same for the agricultural coordinator and the admin assistant. And you can see that full-time equivalency is equals 2080 hours per year based on a 40 hour per week work week. 52 weeks in a year. They started breaking down the fringe benefits and you need to work closely with your financial guru at your organization or tribe. They will know what these benefits should be for these positions and they need to help you fill this section out on fringe benefits for personnel. For travel you need to list the purpose of the travel and the travel destination. So for example, I mentioned earlier that all of our grant award meetings are immediately following the year award announcements usually within two months and in Alaska they're always in Anchorage. So wherever you're coming from in Alaska you would plan on a trip to Anchorage. The training is three days long. So you would budget that in a hotel in Anchorage or flight per diem, et cetera, et cetera. So you need to list the purpose of the travel and the destination, the total number of travelers, and you need to be in compliance with your own tribe or organization's internal travel policies. And list the totals for the following times the number of travelers, the airfare, lodging per diem, and any ground transportation. So if you're taking a shuttle, a Lyft, Uber, a cab, list those in there as well. And you can see here in the budget justification they're talking about the post-award training. It's required travel by ANA, so it's listed out. in this case because this tribe is in Colorado their post-award training is in Phoenix. Yours will be an Anchorage here in Alaska and they listed out the airfare times two people, lodging times four nights, times two people, the federal GSA for per diem is listed. Airport parking, taxi or Uber, mileage to airport is also included if your company or tribe covers that. Again, ANA is requiring you to go to the annual ANA Grantee Meeting and that usually happens in February in Washington, DC so you should budget accordingly. It is a little spendy to go to DC. So make sure that you're not only getting a reasonably priced hotel, hopefully, but we advise that when you're looking for airline tickets, get the medium to high cost quoted so that you don't short yourself when it comes time to travel that you have an under budgeted for a big trip like this. For equipment, you're gonna describe the type of equipment being requested, number of units, the cost per unit greater than 5,000 and a description of how equipment will be used for the project and provide quotes as attachments. The other thing, especially in very rural areas where things are being shipped to you, if you, for example purchase a big generator for your greenhouse and it costs $4,600, but the shipping is a thousand dollars, the cost of getting that unit to you with purchase and shipping is going to be greater than $5,000. So you would definitely include it in equipment even though the actual cost of the item is less than $5,000. Shipping is part of the cost. For supplies, group supplies when possible under office supplies, workshop or meeting supplies and farming supplies, for example, if you have special activities. Give a breakdown of estimated costs and a description of how the supplies will be used for the project. Here's equipment breakdown and supplies breakdown. You can see under meeting supplies that they're going to do workshops. So they're putting manuals and general workshops supplies in there at 110, a month times 10 months. They're doing general office supplies at 200 a month times 12 months for three project staff. It's all broken down very specifically how they came up with that amount. For contractual, provide the name of the contractor. Give a description of the anticipated service and include a scope of work that you will attach to your application, a breakdown of estimated costs and any special parameters for sub awards if you have sub awards. For other, give a good description of the item, a breakdown and computation of the costs and describe why each item is needed for the project. You can see the Pine Creek tribe has a lot under other. They're very specific things that have to come from a specific type of vendor. So you might be able to only buy lemon trees at a certain place that's nearby. So you would go with that and list it out under other. Video conferencing equipment is a monthly rental or lease. So you would list it here under other. Utilities for the forest farm sites are included here. Tractor rental, grader rental. backhoe rental. They're not purchases, but their lease or rental. So they would be listed here under other. And they're talking about paying for some marketing costs for radio spots, newspaper articles, printing for brochures, flyers, mailings. That is listed under other. And then again for indirect costs, for those who already have a negotiated indirect cost rate agreement with the federal government indicate the indirect cost rate in your budget forms and include a copy of that agreement that you have as an attachment. And if you don't have a negotiated rate you may claim the standard 10% diminimous rate as discussed earlier, indicate that you are using 10% of the modified total direct cost basis. There's more discussion in your pre-app manual on page 124 for indirect costs. And you can see here they did indirect costs of the total direct costs. And that came up to 35,896 and they asked the federal government to help pay for that. And it's listed in the budget. Tips on putting together your budget. Follow federal object class categories always. Identify 20% for the non-federal share for every year of the project. Work closely with your finance person for pay scales, fringe rates, and indirect cost rates. And make sure you go back and clean up and scale your budget templates. I can't go over the ceiling amounts. So make sure that you're on track with the budget. Your budget justification, again, describes the calculation and justification for each line-item that you identified earlier. Pardon me? I strongly recommend that you fill out your budget justification first because then you're coming up with the formula that you can then plug in easily into the line-item budget form. The Alaska Region Training and Technical Assistance Center is here to answer any of your questions. We offer up to 16 hours of free pre-application review for an application that is at least 75% completed. We provide tips and resources to help you complete your application. If you would like to request technical assistance please go to www.anaalaska.org, click on technical assistance and then request TA and someone will get back to you shortly. You can also call us at 800-948-3158.

Up next

Video 11: Community-Based Strategy

Community-Based Strategy

Training episodes

Video 1: Brief Introduction to ANA and New Funding Opportunities

Video 2: How to Build your ANA Application

Video 3: Long-Term Community Goal

Video 4: Current Community Condition

Video 5: Project Goals

Video 6: TTIP Objectives

Video 7: Outcomes, Indicators, and Outputs

Video 8: Outcome Tracker & Outcome Tracking Strategy

Video 9: Objective Work Plan

Video 10: Budget

Video 11: Community-Based Strategy

Video 12: Readiness and Implementation Strategy

Video 13: Contingency Plans

Video 14: Sustainability Plans

Video 15: Organizational Capacity

Video 16: Submitting the Application to ANA

Video 10: Budget

Budget: Line-Item Budget and Budget Justification

Up next

Video 11: Community-Based Strategy

Training episodes

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