Service and Storeroom Centers
Service and storeroom activities (service centers) are established to meet the programmatic needs of the academic community, and mainly provide goods or services to multiple internal users including sponsored programs.
The University of Illinois System has a large number of service funds; therefore responsibilities, policies, and requirements have been established which service center funds and service center managers must adhere to. In addition, each service center is required to calculate and charge rates based on actual costs incurred and usage for the services and/or products they provide. These rates are charged against various university funds including sponsored projects. As a result, the calculations of these charges must comply with university, state, and federal costing principles.
Service Center and Rate Calculation Policies, Regulations, and Requirements
The Code of Federal Regulations (Uniform Guidance Title II CFR Part 200) provides guidelines that establish principles for determining costs applicable to grants, contracts, and other agreements with educational institutions. It also outlines the general federal requirements for calculating service rates. Federal agency Inspector General's audit plans have recently included reviews of service center costs.
In addition, for our UIUC and UIC service centers, Section 3.2.0 of the Federal Cost Accounting Standards Disclosure Statement (DS-2) requires the university to provide information related to specialized service facilities and service centers. Following this requirement, we report various information to the federal government related to service centers with $1 million revenue and/or $250,000 in federal sponsored project revenue in our universities’ DS-2s.
Service center managers must familiarize themselves with policies, procedures, and regulations they are required to follow when operating service centers. Click on the links listed below to access these regulations, etc.
The links below provide departments and managers access to departmental center responsibilities, training, rate development principles, Business Objects Webi reports, and Excel templates.
System Government Costing Responsibilities
It is the service center managers' responsibility to ensure rate calculations are compliant, performed timely, and rates are published. However, on an annual basis the System Government Costing (SGC) identifies select service funds for rate reviews and approvals. There are a wide variety of service funds at the University of Illinois System. Each service center fund is its own business operation and many times contains multiple rates within each fund. In order for our staff to perform these rate reviews/calculations, they must work with each service center to obtain an understanding of their business operations. SGC’s responsibilities include the following:
- Establishment and maintenance of the University of Illinois System service activity policy (22 Self-Supporting/Revenue Generating Activities - Service and Storeroom Activities)
- Providing training for service center personnel and our internal staff
- Performing service rate/fund reviews as deemed necessary
- Providing assistance to departments with rate calculations
- Monitoring the service center's adherence to university and federal policies (3E funds)