Business School

Guidelines and procedures for staff seeking funding support for relatively minor, everyday research expenses from the Business School.

Purpose and summary

The purpose of this policy is to provide a consistent, transparent and equitable set of guidelines for research annums available to Business School staff.  This policy replaces all other research annum related policies operating within the Business School prior to January 1, 2008.

Research annums are intended to provide a mechanism for academic staff, to access School research funds that cover small discretionary expenses, which would otherwise be cumbersome and costly to administer on an individual request-approval basis.

Policy statement

This policy defines the guiding principles for the allocation of funds designed to support minor research expenses outside of the research grant policy. 

• Research annums are dispersed as a standard allocation of $1,500 per full-time staff member. Fractional appointments greater than 0.5 FTE will also receive an allocation on a pro-rata basis. 
• Research annums may be carried forward for a maximum of one year. In some cases, researchers may choose to combine their annums in order to provide a larger funding base or to simply share costs, for example, sharing the cost of a casual research assistant. 

Research annum management

The research annum scheme is funded as an operating budget allocation and operated through the School's research project grant (PG).  All research expenses will be processed by the respective administrative Team Managers via Intent to Purchase Procedures. 

• These annums will operate as debit accounts which will be reconciled and balanced by fund transfers at the end of November each year. 
• All purchases made in December will accrue as annum expenses for the following year and will be processed as such. 
• These timeframes also apply to purchases made with School Purchase Card facilities. 
• Purchase orders that are required in December will be deferred until January of the following year. 
• Quarterly reports will be issued to staff detailing balances and expenditures. 
• Additional reports can be provided on request.    

This annum scheme will be reviewed every 12 months by the Research Committee and approved by the School's Management Group. The level of the research annums will be determined by budgetary levels. 

Criteria for the approval of funding

An application for funding will only be considered if the following criteria are met:

1. All teaching and research academic staff must be on at least a 12 month contract and a fractional appointment of 0.5 FTE to qualify.
2. Expenditure is restricted to legitimate, direct, research expenses. The following are not considered to be direct research expenses:

1. non or indirect research acquisitions,
2. personal salary allowances,
3. hospitality,
4. public relations; or
5. reserves accumulation.

3. Annums may be carried forward for a maximum of one year.  This means that in any given year, staff will receive the annual allocation of $1,500 based on FTE, along with any unspent monies from the previous year.
4. Annums will be pro-rated to factor in any periods of unpaid leave taken by a staff member during the course of the year. 
5. No researcher will be given spending authority beyond the annual set limit as limited by budgetary constraints.
6. Staff must fund the following from research annums, as they will no longer be supported from School operating funds: individual software (excluding MS office, web browser, standard email, Mathtype and SPSS), minor amounts of research assistance, minor amounts (up to $500) of data acquisitions, article reprint costs and publication page charges. 
7. Staff will not be permitted to 'zero out' their research annums or co-finance expenditure from other annums if other funds are available to cover the required amount.
8. If staff require funding for individual society memberships and journal subscriptions from their annums, a special request must be made to the Deputy Dean as per University policy on Memberships and Subscriptions FM 0503C.  University policy states that unless the employment conditions specifically require a certain membership/subscription, then the University shall not fund such purchases. However, the School will continue to fund the following reasonable requests for submissions to journals, computing requirements, office stationery, photocopying requirements and teaching materials.
9. Requests to fund individual journal subscriptions or textbooks/programming manuals should be supported by a statement clearly articulating how the requested item contributes to the staff, Business School or research agenda prior to approval.  Although texts and journals purchased in this way may be kept in staff offices, they will be stamped as property of the UWA and placed on the Business School register which is available on the website.  This means these resources may be requested by the wider school community at any time.