CNF Tool Costs
CNF charges a one-time fee for individuals to participate in the safety training and orientation to become a badged user of the facility. All further trainings, process support and consultations are included in this fee indefinitely. There are fees, however, for daily lab access and for the use of tools.
CNF does not publish a rate sheet for these lab fees, but our User Program managers are eager to assist you, should you wish to estimate a budget for your current or future work. They can advise you based on many years of experience in assisting researchers to attain their research goals. At CNF we assess only a modest daily lab access fee, and then charge for each individual major tool by the usage time as recorded by our lab management software. Each tool has an hourly rate and a minimum usage time that supports the expense to acquire, operate and maintain it. Your rate class depends on whether you are working for an academic institution, government lab, or a company. Our core grant comes from the US National Science Foundation to subsidize access for academic researchers. They require that our fees for services to industry users do not undercut the pricing of similar commercial services. CNF does offer a discount for heavy users of all types, in the form of a “soft cap” that lowers the hourly rates once a dollar threshold is met in a twelve-month period.
Details are in the CNF Lab Manual.
For more information, please contact the User Program
Billing and Tracking of Charges
Users will be billed in the following month for accumulated CNF charges. For Cornell accounts, this is via a journal voucher. For External accounts, invoices are sent via email to the Account Rep provided by PI. More information on external user billing information can be found here: External Billing
Principal Investigators receive a weekly emailed summary of charges for their projects. The weekly summaries are not invoices -- no payment is necessary at that time.
Users, PIs, and Account Representatives may review current charges, updated daily, in XReporter. Adjustments to charges may be requested by contacting the CNF User Program. Users can request Cornell KFS account number changes via CNF WhoIAm. Account Representatives can request Cornell KFS account number changes via the CNF Billing website.
Please note that in support of CNF moving from CORAL to NEMO, XReporter and CNF WhoIAM will reach end of service Jan 1, 2024. The CNF Billing website will be replaced by Quickbooks beginning Feb 1, 2024.
Charges in XReporter and the weekly Principal Investigator charge summaries will not reflect daily entrance fees, annual fee cap discounts, remotes, CNF Apartment nightly charges, cluster usage fees, or CNF Front Desk purchased supply charges until approximately the 15th of the following month. These charges are all separate line items in the XReporter billing reports.
When disabling a tool in CORAL, a popup will state an initial charge for the usage of the tool. This charge is solely based on the tool hourly rate and does not reflect any additional tool usage charges such as per-run supply charges (one example would be the use of Gold in an evaporator). Also, if the tool has a minimum usage charge and the tool usage time is less than the minimum, the popup will not reflect what will be an adjusted charge for the tool's minimum usage.