Direct cost

A cost that can be identified with one project specifically — the salary of someone working on it, the equipment it uses, the travel it requires. It is the half of a budget that is not overhead, and it is a property of an application rather than of an opportunity.

Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.

Also called Direct charges

In detail

The line between direct and indirect is drawn by an organisation’s own accounting policy, applied consistently. The same expense — an accountant’s time, say — can be direct at one organisation and indirect at another, and what matters to an auditor is that the treatment is consistent, not that it matches anyone else’s.

Programmes rarely enumerate allowable direct costs in a structured way. What they publish is a list of activities the money may go to, in prose, in the notice.

Against use of funds

`use_of_funds` records the spending categories a notice names — what the money may be spent on. That is a restriction published by the funder. Whether a given expense is direct or indirect is a judgement made by the applicant’s accounting policy, and no field we hold answers it. The two look similar on a page and answer entirely different questions.

How GrantTrove stores it

  • `use_of_funds` is extracted where a notice states categories, and where it does not the record prints Not stated rather than an empty list. An empty list reads as "no restrictions", which is a claim no notice made.
  • Line-item cost tables, where a programme publishes one, are not parsed into the record. That is stated on the record page rather than left for a reader to discover.

Common questions

Do you list which direct costs a programme allows?

We list the categories a notice states, in `use_of_funds`. We do not classify individual expenses as direct or indirect, because that classification belongs to your accounting policy.

Is staff time a direct cost?

For staff working on the funded project, usually yes. For staff who keep the organisation running, usually not. Your own policy governs, applied consistently.

Where is the programme’s cost guidance?

In the notice, which every record links via `source_url`.