The site budget

A per-country cost estimate built from your Schedule of Assessments.

How much will this study cost per patient, per visit, per country? The site budget answers that question from data you already have: it walks through the Schedule of Assessments, prices every procedure at every visit, and lays the result out in numbers, charts, and tables. Nothing is typed twice — change the schedule, and the budget follows.

Note: The budget is an estimate for planning and comparison. The page itself says so at the bottom: "Verify with your CRO and site contracts before finalising the investigator grant."

Opening the budget#

Open your protocol in the editor and click the Documents button at the top-right.
On the Document Generation page, click the card named Site Budget.
What you'll see: "Generating budget…" for a moment, then a page headed Site Budget Generator with the protocol title and phase beneath it.

Troubleshooting: If the page shows "Failed to load budget", the protocol has no Schedule of Assessments data yet. Fill in that structured section in the protocol editor first — the budget is calculated entirely from it.

Choosing the country and patient count#

Two controls sit at the top-right of the page:

The country list (next to the small globe icon). Pick the country you are budgeting for; all amounts convert to that country's costs and currency.
The patient count box. It shows the current number as a hint — type a different number and click Apply to recalculate the total study cost.

What you'll see after either change: the whole page recalculates — cards, charts, and tables together.

The four number cards#

Across the top of the results:

Cost per Patient — the full cost of taking one participant through every visit, including overhead.
Total Study Cost — cost per patient multiplied by the patient count, for the chosen country.
Procedures — how many distinct assessments the schedule contains, and how many pricing categories they fall into.
Study Visits — how many visits the schedule has, and the total number of procedure occurrences across them.

If anything about the calculation deserves attention — for example a procedure with no price on file — an amber warning banner appears above the cards explaining it.

The charts#

Four charts follow, in two rows:

Cost Distribution by Category — a ring chart showing which kinds of work (laboratory, imaging, clinical procedures, and so on) consume the budget.
Cost per Visit — a bar per visit; tall bars are the expensive visits.
Country Cost Comparison — the cost per patient in each configured country, in US dollars, with your selected country highlighted in bold blue. Useful when deciding where to open sites.
Cumulative Cost Accrual — a rising line showing how the per-patient cost builds up visit by visit.

Rest your mouse on any chart to see the exact figures.

The detail tables#

Below the charts, a card with two tabs holds the line-by-line detail:

Procedure Detail — one row per assessment: its category, how many visits it occurs at, the unit rate, the total cost, and its share of the budget as a small bar. Click any column heading to sort — for example, click Total Cost to see the most expensive procedures first.
Visit Breakdown — one row per visit: its timing, the number of procedures, the visit's cost, and the running cumulative cost.

After the tables, Category Cost Summary lists each category with its occurrence count and share, and the gray footer card totals everything: Direct Cost / Patient, Overhead (20%), Grand Total / Patient, and the total for the whole study.

Where the prices come from#

Every unit rate comes from your organization's pricing library, not from the protocol. Administrators maintain it on the Budget Pricing page — standard rates per procedure category, country cost indexes, and exchange rates. See Abbreviations, redaction, and budget pricing. The footer of the budget page states the assumptions used for your view: the currency, the country's cost index as a percentage of the US baseline, and the exchange rate.

If a rate looks wrong in the budget, the fix belongs in Budget Pricing — correct it there once, and every study's budget updates.

Note: The budget page is a live calculation, not a stored document. It is recalculated each time you open it, so it always matches the current schedule and current prices. To keep a snapshot, use your browser's print function while the numbers are on screen.