The budget and supporting documents
A grant application combines a costed, justified request with forms and supporting documents that demonstrate the resources and commitments behind the proposed work.
Budget planning and justification
The budget should be planned early, often with a project manager: requesting too much can undermine the proposal, while too small an award can leave the project underfunded. Every requested item needs justification, including why particular travel is necessary and what will be copied or mailed if photocopying or postage is requested. Budget terminology includes direct and indirect costs, the latter called facilities and administrative costs at the NIH, and TBA, “to be added”, for faculty, staff or equipment dependent on successful funding.
The funding agency’s rules and the request for proposals determine allowable costs; equipment such as computers or administrative expenses such as secretarial support may be prohibited. Budget preparation should consider these categories:
- Personnel, including salary support for the principal investigator, co-investigators and research associates.
- Independent contractors.
- Consultants.
- Supplies, including paper, envelopes and printer ink.
- Clinical items, such as needles, syringes and laboratory supplies.
- Equipment, including hardware, software and sometimes furniture.
- Fees paid to participants.
- Space or equipment rental.
- Travel to project sites.
- Conference expenses for presenting the results.
- Miscellaneous costs, including advertising, copying, printing, insurance and postage.
- Facilities and administrative costs.
One recommended budget format has three sections: funds needed for year one, funds requested for the remaining support period, and the budget justification. The justification explains why each item is needed and when the money will be spent; although some agencies request only global budgets, most require detailed justification. For major expenses, the application should explain how costs were estimated, perhaps appending vendor estimates.
Support from other sources can add credibility, and funding agencies, especially private foundations, favour projects that have attracted it. Agencies generally prefer new projects to repeatedly funding the same activity, so an application for work continuing beyond the award should explain how it will continue. A clinical trial may end when funding ends, while a training grant, typically supporting a three-year programme, may require a plan for continued education after the grant; programmes can subsequently be self-funded.
Forms and reusable institutional information
At one institutional grants office in 2012, standard forms such as biosketches, budgets, facilities and resource descriptions easily occupied half a final application, but researchers often gave them less attention than the research plan. The office had employed a budget specialist whose services were in high demand even among researchers who did not want editorial help, although the post was vacant at the time. It reused institutional material that changed little between years, tailored detailed information from the institution’s website and used Excel spreadsheets to populate required budget sheets more easily and accurately.
Supporting documents can consume investigators’ time when produced from scratch, while hurried, substandard versions may reduce reviewers’ confidence. In 2023, the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s free SciENcv application helped investigators build a complete, compliant NIH-style biosketch. Institutional boilerplate on facilities, resources, expertise and administrative structures can provide a starting point but may grow stale after a couple of years; outdated details should be removed and newer resources added, with a fresh review from the relevant facility or office where details are uncertain. An institutional medical writer can maintain a current boilerplate library for investigators.
Generic boilerplate should not be copied unchanged: irrelevant resources should be removed and relevant material enriched with project-specific wording, because coherence across the application signals that the investigator has considered how its pieces will work together. Facilities and resources, equipment and the biosketch personal statement are sections in which tailored wording can emphasise relevance. Examples of emphasis and tailored content include:
| Emphasis | Tailored content |
|---|---|
| Access and relevance | A colleague’s agreement with a gait-analysis laboratory to monitor participants’ fluidity of motion after surgery, supported by a letter. |
| Location, features and purpose | A PET/CT scanner in the principal investigator’s division, identified by make and model and equipped with respiratory and cardiac gating, to reconstruct phase-matched images and screen enrollees for lung cancer recurrence. |
| Commitment and role | A co-investigator’s responsibility for the key-informant interviews in Aim 2, including ethics approval, protocol-adherent interviews, transcription and coding. |
Letters, appendices and other attachments
The main grant application should stand alone, with appendices providing supporting material that reviewers may neither receive nor read. Support letters and affiliation agreements may belong in the appendix. Required support letters should be requested early, for example from a dean or a department chair whose cooperation is essential; supplying a proposed draft may help obtain a prompt response. An affiliation agreement may already be in institutional files; a new one should likewise be requested early, with a draft where useful.
A copy of any consent form participants will sign should be included in the appendix. Requested investigator biosketches should follow the prescribed content, format and page limit. A long reference list may also be placed in the appendix. Other requested attachments can include the board-of-directors list, an Internal Revenue Tax Exempt Letter or a current financial statement.