Completing the Service Center Rate Calculation Template

Rate Calculation Worksheets

The worksheets are provided as a tool for calculating the rates for service centers with either three or up to ten services. Service centers with greater than ten types of services must contact the Service Center Administration Office for additional assistance and resources.

NOTE: The template is designed to calculate an estimated rate(s) based upon information input by the service center. To avoid changing formulas within the spreadsheet, please only input information into the yellow highlighted cells on each tab.

Direct Salary and Wages

For each employee whose salary is to be included in the proposed rate, please complete the information requested on the salary and wage worksheet. To be included in a rate, more than an incidental portion of the employee’s time should be committed to providing the service. Please note that anyone whose salary is included in a rate must be funded by the cost center where the revenue from the rate is being credited. No more than 100% of any employee’s salary and wages may be recovered through a combination of service center charges and other funding sources. Thus salary and wages provided by other funding sources must be excluded from the service center rate calculation. The maximum salary that can be entered is limited to the NIH salary cap.

Other Direct Expenses

Please include direct expenses that can be specifically applied to a service or good. Please ensure that these figures are in annual amounts. Please list major categories of expenses (e.g. supplies, reagents, maintenance contracts, etc). These should only include items required to perform the service or produce the product, not administrative supplies.

Equipment

It may be possible to include equipment depreciation in a rate if equipment usage is a significant part of providing the service, the service center is responsible for providing funds to replace the equipment, and the equipment was not purchased with federal, federal flow through, or matching cost share funds. If equipment depreciation is to be included in the rate, please provide the information for each piece of equipment. NOTE – In order to ensure consistency with the University’s recorded depreciation expense as well as to ensure that any depreciation expense reflected in a service center rate is excluded from the University’s Federal Facilities and Administrative Rate calculation, the Office of Facilities Cost Analysis will provide the depreciation expense amount. Service centers requesting to include depreciation expense within their service center fee calculations are responsible for contacting the Office of Facilities Cost Analysis.

Administrative Overhead Expenses

Please include expenses that are a part of the service center’s operations but cannot be specifically applied to an individual service or good. Examples include (but are not limited to): the Director’s allocation of salary & fringe benefits, general office supplies, training etc. Please be sure these figures are in annual amounts. List major categories of expenses (e.g. general office supplies, office telephone, staff training, etc).

Forecasted Usage

Please provide in annual amounts the forecasted usage/sales of service or goods to be provided/sold for each service.

Expense Summary

The expense summary worksheet is the tool for calculating the rate to be used in charging for the proposed service. It combines the totals from the five previous worksheets and divides by the units of production or service (forecasted usage) in order to arrive at a cost per unit. Please be sure to enter any allowable carry forward of deficit/surplus on line 20, so it will factor into the calculation. That is the only amount entered on this worksheet – all other amounts are calculated.

Proposed Rate(s)

This tab provides a high level summary and distribution breakdown for the proposed rates calculated on the ‘Expense Summary’ tab.

Revenue Summary

Using the ‘Proposed Rate(s)’ and ‘Forecasted Usage’ tabs, this worksheet calculates the estimated revenue by customer category.

Please contact Service Center Administration for questions and assistance.

Revised: September 2020