[SoftTalker]

> I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes

They absolutely are. The salaries of faculty and postdocs, student stipends, and administrative support staff are apportioned to each grant they work on.

[dekhn]

Yep- when I was a PI and had several grants, when one was getting close to used up, the finops people would call me over and we'd switch people around to working on a different grant.

I told the finops people this seemed weird especially because people kept working on the original grant, so it sounded... fraudulent (I didn't put this in email, just verbally) and they said "that's how it's done".

After that I asked the finops people if I could manage my own grants directly and they didn't allow me. It was around this time I started planning my move to industry.