Full Cost Recovery

Welcome to the full cost recovery calculator. The calculator will help give you an indication of the ‘full’ cost of your project.

The calculator is based on principles of full cost recovery set out by ACEVO and is only designed as an indicator. If you are interested in finding the full cost of your projects and service, please us the Contact Us page or check the e-bulletin for local training sessions.

Principles

The term `Full Cost Recovery` is gaining widespread usage in the voluntary sector. The concept is nothing new: it simply means securing funding for – or `recovering` - all your costs, including the direct costs of projects and all your overheads. Every organisation – whether voluntary, public or private – needs to recover all its costs, and ideally generate a surplus, or it cannot pay its employees, rent office space, offer its products and services or plan for the future and the continued development and delivery of its services.

Please enter all of your direct costs (costs which are directly attributable to the project itself). Costs that are shared by a number of projects are entered separately later on.

What?

Direct costs are costs of activities which constitute the project itself. For example, the costs of a youth worker working in a youth club, the costs of people working directly on counselling, the cost of equipment needed to deliver a session, the cost of a project specific manger.

Please enter the total of your premise and office costs that the various projects and functions of your organisation use.

Please enter an approximate percentage of these costs that are relevant to your project. For example, if your office has 4 desks and this project takes up 2, then you would enter 50%.

What?

Premises and office costs include items such as renting and maintaining your building(s), utilities, computers, desks, furniture, etc.

In small organisations, staff are usually in one building, sometimes even in just one room. This means that the premises and office costs are shared among everyone, regardless of who works on projects and who works in other administrative parts of the organisation.

Premises and office costs are often an overhead cost for third sector organisations. However, sometimes some premises costs should be included as direct costs for some services. For example, suppose an organisation providing community programmes for the elderly holds educational classes in rooms in another building down the street. The premises cost of using the rooms (probably rent, and utilities if they are not included in the rent) is a direct cost of the programme since the rooms are part of delivering the programme. However, the organisation would still have premises cost for the building and rooms where all their staff work, which would be an overhead cost for the organisation.

Please enter the total of your costs for all of your Central Functions.

Please enter an approximate percentage of these costs that are relevant to your project. For example, if your organisation has 4 projects all using similar amounts of central function resource, then you would enter 25%.

What?

Central functions costs are those associated with the person or people responsible for the various central functions in your organisation – the centre of support and administration for your organisation. These functions can be performed by either paid staff or volunteers.

In larger organisations, the various central functions are often managed separately or by different people. However, in small organisations, only one or two people may look after all of them.

Please enter the total of your Governance and Strategic Development costs.

Please enter an approximate percentage of these costs that are relevant to your project. For example, if your organisation has 5 projects all using similar amounts of governance & strategic development resource, then you would enter 20%.

What?

Governance costs arise because of an organisation’s need to plan, and its regulatory obligations. It needs to be accountable to the general public and its employees as well as to funders, government or regulators (e.g. the Charity Commission, the Health and Safety Executive.) They include items such as audit, legal and professional fees, and trustee expenses. Though trustees are often volunteers, they may still incur expenses such as travel costs.

In addition, there are costs related to prospective future activities of the organisation, which are called strategic development costs. These might include consultancy or special trustees’ meetings to explore the direction of the organisation or the impact of legislation.

Organisations rarely have any one person in charge of governance and strategic development. Instead it is usually part of the central functions’ responsibilities.

Please enter all of your General Fundraising costs.

Please enter an approximate percentage of these costs that are relevant to your project. For example, if your organisation has 2 projects all using similar amounts of general fundraising resource, then you would enter 50%.

What?

General fundraising costs are those costs associated with raising unrestricted funds for the organisation, and include managing investments. These costs include any people responsible for raising these funds, fundraising events, direct mail appeals, membership drives, etc. and any marketing or publicity that supports the general fundraising efforts.

In addition to anyone who may be specifically responsible for general fundraising, it is often part of what the central functions do, particularly the Director.For example, your Director may spend half of his/her time meeting with potential funders and developing strategies for different fundraising appeals. Similarly, the person in charge of your finances will often be involved in putting together budgets for funding applications and then providing expenditure reports to funders. The costs associated with this work on general fundraising by the central functions will be captured during the allocation of the central function costs and should not be included in this table.

Note that only costs of general fundraising (i.e. raising unrestricted funds for the organisation as a whole) are considered overheads. The cost of raising funds specifically for projects (i.e. restricted funds) should be included as a direct cost of the project since the cost exists only because of the project.

Privacy Notice

Your details will only be used to monitor who is using our service, and to contact you regarding full cost recovery and other related services. You will not be added to any mailing lists, and your details will not be passed onto third parties.