Managing Personnel Allocations

During the course of most awards, you will have a need to pay your personnel from the award funds. PI and key personnel effort must be kept approximately equivalent to that which you budgeted unless you request a formal budget reallocation.

The work you are now funded to do may require hiring new staff or bringing a new student to the lab. These actions have important legal requirements and you can find guidance on hiring staff and on recruiting a student elsewhere in the faculty handbook.

The work may mean that you want to change the source of funds supporting an existing member of your staff. It is certainly possible to split the source of salary for any employee, such that they are paid a percentage of their effort from one grant, and a different percentage of their effort from another grant.

A little more care is needed in supporting students on grants because you pay both salary and tuition from your grants for your students. A student must be paid from the grant that is paying their tuition. For example, you cannot pay a student salary on one grant and pay their tuition on another grant. However, it is not necessary to pay all of the student salary and tuition from the same grant. For example, you could pay half of the salary and the full tuition from one grant and the other half of the salary from a different grant. It is not currently possible to pay tuition for a student if they are not receiving salary support from a University account. It is also important that the student remain a student throughout any semester in which they are having their tuition paid. If the student completes their degree program (i.e., hands in a thesis to the graduate school) and terminates employment as a student prior to end of the semester, they will be billed for the tuition for the entire semester.

To ensure that you have your personnel covered as you wish and that you spend in accordance with the budget and justification that you submitted with your proposal, the Business Office will work with you on how best to allocate your personnel costs across your active grants. Planning ahead and discussing your budgets and personnel needs regularly with the Business Office are key to making this work smoothly for you and your staff with as few funding sources changes as possible. Changes in salary sources may be accomplished by an email the Business Office.