Designing a Rate System for an Imaging Recharge Center

Abstract

Presented at the M&M 2007 Facility Operation & Management Focused Interest Group session As you all know, recharge: the price or rate a microscopy facility charges others to use their instruments, is a big topic on the MSA listserver and everybody struggles with designing rate systems. My talk is geared to U.S. labs and a lot of our restrictions regarding rates are not the same in Canada or other countries around the world. Our goal is designing recharge systems that will encourage facility use that will also recover the cost of the operation. How much you have to recover depends on your particular operation, your administration, and institutional requirements. The basic approach to producing a rate charge system is really cut and dried-especially according to the accountants. You determine the supply and expense costs and anticipated use and you come up with a rate. Simple, straight forward and, if you do that, you probably will fail. So you go through exercises such as itemizing how much it costs for a particular procedure. You add in what you anticipate the labor could be, and you come up with a rate. Now, this may not be the same for every specimen placed in the instrument, but you hope it kind of averages out so that you don't have multiple rate scenarios for handling different types of specimens. You put your computed rates into a spreadsheet, give it to the accountants. They start juggling it around and it ends up that your high edge TEM costs $10 an hour and your low end TEM costs $50 an hour. They've no concept of actually what the equipment is, what it costs to run it, why one is more desirable than the other, and why you need all these things in the first place. Another approach is to determine your total yearly costs. You then come up with what you consider is an appropriate rate for your users for each instrument. You want to encourage use of the facilities rather than discourage them. The rate has to be-and this is what the bookkeepers have a hard time understanding-it has to be affordable.