Income & Recharge Program

The Office of Budget & Planning provides oversight and guidance to ensure that all Income & Recharge Centers comply with federal and UC policies and recover costs to avoid impacts on other resources.

Income & Recharge Centers are university units created for the primary purpose of providing products and/or services in support of the university’s education, research and public service mission.

Income & Recharge programs recover the cost of providing these services from the unit served on a “rate basis”.

• For internal customers an internal charging mechanism, referred to as “recharge”, is used to redistribute expenses for products or services provided by the Income & Recharge Unit.
• Sales and services provided to external entities are not achieved by the internal recharge mechanism. Rather charges and revenue are processed by a billing invoice and a cash receipt or credit card transaction, generating income.

The primary reason recharge programs exist is to share resources and provide services for internal users. Inappropriate outside use of university resources could jeopardize the university’s tax-exempt status for various purposes, give rise to claims of warranty and other liabilities, or appear to involve unfair pricing in relation to service providers in the local business community. As a non-profit business entity, the units providing the products or services function as a non-profit business and recharge in order to recover the costs of providing such products or services.

Income & Recharge activities can include:

• Auxiliary Enterprises – Self-supporting activities which provide non-instructional support in the form of goods and services to students, faculty, and staff upon payment of a specific user charge or fee for the goods and services provided.
• Identifiable Goods or Services provided at the request of the user.
• Central Campus Administration services provided by central campus administration units to self-supporting activities, or for services provided beyond the norm to those activities. Funding for the services should not have been part of the permanent departmental budget. Example: Human Resource training for a fee.
• Conferences - Conferences, seminars, symposia, workshops, retreats, and meetings, which are sponsored by a UCSB department or unit and where some or all participants will charge a UC account string for their participation.
  • Contracts to host these events at an off-campus facility and/or an agreement to co-host (cost share) an event must be reviewed and approved by B&FS.
• Pass-Through Activities - Activities in which one unit, without recovering its own costs for providing the service, collects a series of third-party costs and periodically transfers those costs to another unit. No value is added to the product other than convenience. The cost/rate transferred represents only the invoiced or direct cost of the product/service. Pass-Through Activities, by definition, will always break-even. External users may not be included in Pass-Through Activities. See Pass-Through Activities for more information.
• Service Enterprises – Service departments which provide a specific type of service to various institutional departments, rather than to individuals, and which have operating costs supported by recharges to the departments receiving the services.

Rates set by regulatory bodies and rates subject to control through other specific University policy are excluded from the jurisdiction of the Income & Recharge Program. These include but are not limited to the following:

• Academic fees
• Course Material & Service fees. See the Office of Budget & Planning website for more information.
• Miscellaneous Student fees
• PACE Open Enrollment fees
• Parking Services
• Residence halls, including dining commons
• Summer Session fees for instructional programs
• Admission to athletic events, arts and lectures programs, and other events
• Sponsorships - Managed by Procurement and CFO of Development. See B&FS website for more information.

Proposal Submission Deadlines

2024-2025 proposals must be submitted to the Office of Budget & Planning by the following dates: 

• Centers that did not receive an approval memo from the Office of Budget & Planning for 2023-24 rates are due February 2, 2024
• Centers that received an approval memo from the Office of Budget & Planning for 2023-24 rates are due March 29, 2024