research-finance

Financial management of internal R&D programs and portfolios: program budgeting with F&A, burn/runway tracking, and capitalize-vs-expense routing. Every number ships with its assumptions block, and accounting-treatment calls route to a named finance owner — this skill never books an entry.

Purpose

R&D finance partners, program controllers, and operations leads manage money that has already been allocated or raised — not the corporate close, not the next funding round, not finding a grant. This skill structures three recurring decisions:

Three deterministic tools:

1. program_budget_planner.py — Builds a multi-period budget from work-package line items, applies the F&A (indirect) rate to an MTDC-style eligible base, and rolls up direct / F&A / fully-loaded cost per period with an explicit assumptions block.
2. burn_runway_tracker.py — Computes average + trailing burn, runway in periods/months, and whether each value-inflection milestone is reachable before cash runs out. Flags accelerating burn and below-threshold runway.
3. capex_vs_opex_router.py — Scores each R&D cost item against the IAS 38 development-phase criteria (or flags US GAAP ASC 730 expense-as-incurred) and routes it to CAPITALIZE-CANDIDATE / EXPENSE / FINANCE-OWNER-REVIEW with a named owner. Never auto-decides.

When to use

Invoke this skill when: