UTK Budget Extractor — Spreadsheets to Proposal Documents

What faculty used it for

A multi-investigator DOE proposal arrives as a pile of institutional budget spreadsheets — one per faculty member, sometimes grouped by program — and every number in them has to reappear, correctly, in prose justifications, summary tables, and a consolidated workbook. Doing that by hand is transcription at scale, which means it is error-prone at scale.

Point this tool at the folder and it produces, for each input file, a set of LaTeX macro definitions covering every budget figure and an individual budget justification. Across all inputs it produces combined definitions, a unified justification, faculty summary tables in both one-row-per-person and year-by-year form, a master driver document that aggregates the justifications, and a merged Excel workbook. The merge writes only user-input cells and never overwrites a formula, so the consolidated workbook stays live rather than becoming a flattened snapshot.

Two details matter more than they sound. Similar entries are consolidated where that is legitimate — graduate research assistants sharing a base salary, for instance — without losing cost accuracy. And when workbook-wide settings such as F&A rates or inflation assumptions disagree between input files, the tool warns rather than silently picking one.

Why it was useful

Because every figure is emitted as a LaTeX macro into a dedicated defs/ folder, updating numbers is decoupled from the proposal text. A budget revision three days before the deadline means re-running the extractor and recompiling; the edited prose is untouched. That separation is the difference between a routine update and a nervous re-read of the whole document.

This tool was originally hand written years ago after I caught a math error in a justification in a submitted proposal. Horrified knowing that it came from a forgotten copy-and-paste, I vowed to never have that happen again and built a latex builder such that no manual numbers needed to be typed. Claude helped expand this into multi-PI proposal handling, automatic skeleton justification writing and merging.

Materials to adapt

• The UTKBudgetExtractor repository. Run it as python -m utkbudget /path/to/budgets -o output_dir.
• Python with openpyxl, and your institution’s budget spreadsheets in .xlsx form.
• Adapting this elsewhere is mostly a matter of remapping cell locations to your own institution’s template; the document generation, macro emission, and formula-preserving merge are independent of that layout. Work from a dummy budget in your institution’s format if you would rather not send real figures to an AI service.