100% agree admin is hard to attribute to individual service lines and if you have a template that allows you to do admin salary as an indirect, that would seem to be optimal.
We used to be able to put admin salary in the indirect bucket, but more recently our institution has required that all salary be captured under the direct cost component. Given this requirement, we do our best to distribute percent effort to each service. The services with the most billable units, or requiring the most effort from the administrator are weighted accordingly.
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Michelle Winter
Assistant Dean of Core Operations
University of Kansas Medical Center
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Original Message:
Sent: 03-16-2025 10:39
From: Nicole White
Subject: Core administrators on recharge funds
Hi Everyone,
Question. As I know governance is often subject to interpretation :)
How are some of you including administrative costs in the recharge rate when the activity or labor cannot be directly associated to the service. Instead, I have always viewed administrative support as indirect cost. We break things out as indirect labor, indirect materials, and direct labor and direct materials amd allocated according to each service in our cost sheets.
For example, an admin does not run a analyzer for which the hourly rate is assessed. They may provide billing and operations support but that support is not directly related to one service. It is related to the operations of the facility. Therefore, I put that in the indirect bucket.
Looking for other viewpoints on the interpretation of rate development for costs. There is 100 ways to fry an egg.
Original Message:
Sent: 3/16/2025 10:22:00 AM
From: Michelle Winter
Subject: RE: Core administrators on recharge funds
Hi Natasha and all-
The high level explanation at KUMC-
Cores aligned with P30s/U54s or other center/COBRE grants generally have the administrative needs of the core covered on grant support.
Institutional cores that are not aligned with grant provided admin support have a variety of models, but one that we invoke regularly is inclusion of a percentage of an admin on the recharge rate. This allows multiple cores to come together to crowd fund a position and do so at a net neutral position to the institution. There is a "champion" within the institutional leadership team who evaluates and advocates for the size and alignment of the centralized administrative pool. This also allows cores to flex into and out of utilization of the central pool services based on need (growth or retraction of the core, turn over in unit aligned admin, etc) and for the recharge structure to stay aligned to support.
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Michelle Winter
Assistant Dean of Core Operations
University of Kansas Medical Center
Original Message:
Sent: 03-14-2025 10:52
From: Natasha Nikolaidis
Subject: Core administrators on recharge funds
Do any of your institutions support core administrators on recharge budgets? We've never done this in the past, but are being asked to begin building those salaries into our cores.
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Natasha Nikolaidis
Associate Director of Operations
Purdue University
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