Community Exchange

 View Only

  • 1.  Allocating overhead to childcare facility on campus

    Posted 7 days ago

    Hello, our college has both a daycare and grade school on campus. Our budget team would like to allocate overhead to these facilities so they can get a clearer picture of how much it costs to operate them. For those of you that have ancillary facilities on campus, such as a daycare, do you allocate overhead to these facilities for internal analysis? If so, what methodology do you use to allocate these costs?



    ------------------------------
    Eric Pinsoneault
    Deputy Controller
    Smith College
    ------------------------------


  • 2.  RE: Allocating overhead to childcare facility on campus

    Posted 6 days ago

    We have two affiliate hospitals on campus and assess them for road maintenance and security, as well as a portion of our general liability and property insurance. I'm happy to show the model if you'd like. You can reach me at krista.khramov@cuanschutz.edu 



    ------------------------------
    Krista Khramov
    Budget Manager
    University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Allocating overhead to childcare facility on campus

    Posted 6 days ago

    We have numerous cost sharing agreements across campus that have a wide variety of assessment, I am surprised that if they are acting as independent entities that no one has discussed a budget with them previously, but our general guideline would be as follows:
    - Consider direct costs such as building utilities, any of their permanent staff, supplies, anything that you can attach to their space that is 100% their responsibility
    - Indirect costs are harder - but think of every campus service provided either by staff outside of their unit, or as part of the general area in order to serve them - groundskeepers, maintenance, police/security, parking and transportation, legal/liability/risk management, environmental health and safety, HR?, IT/Networking, any other auxiliary services? We have done prorations here based on how many acres of space, how much building square footage in relation to campus, how many employees they have, etc. 
    - VERY indirect costs - are employees of the daycare or school provided any other perks on campus - free usage of the gym? meal credits at the dining hall? parking? that you could assign a value to?

    Also - if you are not already doing so, if they are generating revenue, you need to have a clear expectation what your cost recovery is and what is subsidised -
    Daycare -  are people paying for it, are they getting rates or discounts, if revenue falls short of costs, is that directly or indirectly addressed? do you have an expected recovery KPI?
    School Lunches - do they pay for school lunches, do you expect full cost recovery? any again, do you directly or indirectly address a cost shortfall?
    I would guess there would also be student fees, field trip costs, event costs that would need to be self-recovering

    With many of our affiliated units across campus, we draft a "MOU" - Memorandum of Understanding - that defines all of these sorts of things, how is responsible for what cost, direct or indirect reimbursement, etc. so their are no surprises or mis-translations - this document also specifies the reporting rythym for updates - can you provide them with a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual update or a dashboard showing all these items?



    ------------------------------
    Matthew Beeman
    Data Analyst
    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Allocating overhead to childcare facility on campus

    Posted 5 days ago

    We do not for internal purposes, but we have to allocate overhead for reporting purposes for some of our child care center accreditation. As a note, we operate our own child care centers. It is not in partnership with another entity. We allocate direct expenses that are easily measures (like utilities, since it is separately metered). We don't allocate expenses where the impact of the center is de minimis, such as property and liability insurance, IT support (child cares are very low tech), grounds, etc. 

    Our child care center primarily serves students (80%+ of children are children of students) and we serve a lot of student parents, so we aren't trying to pin expenses on the child care or charge them back. We aim for their revenue to cover their direct expenses. When allocating overhead, we're trying to realistically report the costs associated with the center but not extend that into expenses we would be paying regardless.



    ------------------------------
    Sylvia Ramirez
    Executive Vice President, Finance & Administration
    Madison Area Technical College
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


Related Content