R&D Budget and Milestone Runway
Build R&D budgets with F&A splits, track milestone runway, and route accounting questions to the finance owner.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
Building an R&D budget requires thinking about your team size, infrastructure costs, and how long you expect the program to run. You'd want to project headcount growth, estimate server and compute costs, and account for any external services or data you'll need. You'll probably want a contingency buffer. Some costs are direct (salaries, cloud) and some are indirect overhead. I'd recommend building this in a spreadsheet and testing different scenarios. How many people do you plan to hire? What's your expected compute spend? Do you have any major milestones that need specific resources? Once you tell me more, I can help you structure the budget.
R&D PROGRAM BUDGET — 24 months Program goal: Develop production ML model for customer churn prediction Start date: August 2026 BUDGET OVERVIEW: Year 1 (Aug 2026 - Jul 2027): 1,240,000 Year 2 (Aug 2027 - Jul 2028): 1,580,000 Total: 2,820,000 DIRECT COSTS (70% of budget): Headcount: 1,240,000 Lead researcher (Year 1-2): 180,000 2 senior ML engineers (year 1-2): 360,000 1 junior engineer (year 2 start): 120,000 Data engineer (year 1-2): 160,000 Salary growth 3% annual: included Compute/infrastructure: 420,000 Cloud GPU spend (AWS/GCP): 240,000 Data storage and pipelines: 120,000 Software licenses: 60,000 INDIRECT COSTS — F&A (30% of direct): 498,000 Allocated at 30% rate per institutional policy ASSSUMPTIONS DOCUMENTED: • Hiring 3 headcount by month 6 • GPU utilization 60% during training phases • 15% cost reduction from cloud volume commitments in year 2 • Assumes no major turnover VALUE INFLECTION MILESTONES: Month 6: Data pipeline validated (go/no-go decision point) Month 12: Model achieves 92% accuracy on holdout set Month 18: Production deployment in 3 customer accounts Month 24: Model improving customer retention by 5% minimum BURN RATE: 103,300 monthly average (year 1), 131,700 (year 2) Runway: Full 24 months funded. Recommend milestone reviews every quarter. NOTE: This budget analysis is for planning purposes only, not accounting guidance. Route capitalize-vs-expense decisions to finance team for final treatment.
About this skill
Your research budget says the program is funded, but equipment orders, indirect charges, and a delayed milestone tell a different story. This skill builds a period-by-period R&D budget and identifies the first funding shortfall, with the assumptions and calculations visible.
What it does
- Separates direct costs, the eligible F&A base, indirect charges, and actual cash payments.
- Reconciles actual spending, open commitments, and remaining work without counting the same purchase twice.
- Calculates runway from scheduled payments and available funding, including restricted funding pools and reserve requirements.
- Shows whether funding reaches the next research milestone and what a delay or failed experiment would cost.
- Explains budget variances and identifies the incremental cost of continuing, pausing, or stopping work.
- Prepares capitalize-versus-expense review packets for a designated finance owner without making accounting determinations.
What you get
A multi-period budget or focused spending analysis with an assumptions block, reconciled totals, milestone coverage, and specific funding decisions. Ambiguous accounting items come with the evidence needed for finance review and any unresolved ownership clearly flagged.
Best for
R&D program managers, research operations leads, principal investigators, and finance partners managing money already allocated to research programs or portfolios.
SKILL.md preview
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name: rd-budget-and-milestone-runway
description: Builds multi-period R&D budgets by separating direct costs, eligible F&A bases, commitments, and cash timing; reconciles burn and tests funding against research milestones. Prepares accounting decision packets for a designated finance owner. Use when the user says "budget this research program", "split direct and indirect costs", "how much runway do we have", "will funding reach the next milestone", "our research budget keeps overrunning", "are we double-counting commitments", or "should this R&D cost be capitalized".
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# R&D Budget and Milestone Runway
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