Follow-up Budget Questions for New Chairs: Flexibility, Carry Over, and Incentives, Part II

After the first two questions posed in a previous article on budgeting and finance, namely identifying the sources of academic income and how the department’s budget is established, have been answered, the new chair should quickly align the answers to see if the department’s budget contains elements of the income it generates. For example, lab fees generate a good deal of income for laboratory-based departments and they rarely cover 100 percent of the costs.