How to Calculate costs and balance your diagnostic lab budget
Carrie Lapaire Harmon, SPDN Co-Director
The Communicator: Volume 6, Issue 2, February 2025
It's that time of year again! No, not deciding between spring cleaning and hibernation; thinking about your annual budget! With the NPDN annual amendment coming up later in the spring, and our next cooperative agreement application in less than a year, we all need to be mindful of our budgets. Most of our labs have money coming in from multiple sources, including NPDN and other grants, maybe sample fees, and if we are lucky, also some state or institutional funds. Whatever the nudge, I have been asked a few times recently about how to calculate costs in the diagnostic lab and how to balance a budget for the upcoming year. To that end, I’d like to remind the network about the GPDN webinar in our LearnUpon system: The Price is Right: Calculating cost recovery in the diagnostic clinic https://npdn.learnupon.com/saml/init?redirect_uri=/catalog/2604480.*
The Excel spreadsheet* I use to calculate costs (and therefore prices) is part of the course resources. Already listened to the webinar and it didn’t really answer your question? Tried the Excel and it’s not working for your situation? Let me know and I can develop a FAQ document to add to the course resources. Want to know more about balancing and justifying a whole-program budget (or are already a wiz at it and can offer guidance to others)? Send a message to me and your regional center and we’ll figure out budgeting part two!
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