About
The Research Grant Costing Platform streamlines the preparation of non-salary budget tables for research grant applications. Rather than maintaining rates by hand across scattered PDFs and spreadsheets, users draw on two complementary sources of figures. Verified benchmark rates — drawn from authoritative published schedules covering airport transfers, artist and artsworker fees, author and illustrator fees, international and national travel allowances, participant and community engagement compensation, and vehicle use — auto-fill a row the moment an item is selected, with each figure current and defensible. Live supplier estimates reach out to third-party providers in real time for items that move with the market, including flights, accommodation, car hire, postage, cloud computing, printing, open access charges, mileage, and online study costs, with live currency conversion landing foreign-currency costs in your chosen display currency, so that what appears in the budget reflects what would actually be paid today.
For anything outside the reference set, custom budget items can be entered with their own unit price, currency, and description. Subtotals, GST, indirect cost recovery (ICR), and profit margin are calculated automatically and update live as figures change. Every budget follows a guided nine-step path — from naming your project, through setting the rules, browsing by category, and watching costs auto-fill, to planning across years and institutions, saving to your library, and exporting. Budgets support up to ten year tabs with one-click duplication of a year's items, and collaborative research support for tracking funding requests against contributions — cash or in-kind — from multiple responsible organisations. Completed budgets save to a personal library for later editing and export to CSV or a formula-rich Excel workbook.
Access required
Access to the Research Grant Costing Platform is available by purchase of a voucher. To continue, please purchase a voucher and redeem it on this page. Once redeemed, the voucher will unlock full access to the calculator's features for the duration specified.
Budgets saved to the library during periods of active access remain available to the user after the access and voucher have expired. These budgets may be accessed, downloaded as CSV, and reopened for editing at any time without the purchase of an additional voucher. Users are responsible for retaining copies of downloaded materials for their own records.
Want to see how the calculator works before purchasing? Visit the public preview page for a walkthrough of the workflow.
Redeem a voucher
To use the Research Grant Costing Platform effectively, users should have a clear understanding of the budget requirements for their grant application, including applicable indirect cost recovery (ICR) rates and whether GST applies to the budget items.
The time required for the interaction with the Research Grant Costing Platform will vary depending on the number of budget items and whether custom entries are needed.