As of January 2022, the following updates will be made to the use of service centers by outside organizations:

If work is being done in a service center lab on behalf of another party, and the other party is being billed for the usage, then the billing party’s name and email information should be logged into the service center usage log.

This way, the billing party will directly receive all billable hours during the monthly billing cycle.

The party doing the lab work, if they are not the billing party, should put their name and information about the project in the Comments section of the usage log.

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When creating a usage log on the Service Center app, information put into the below section will appear in the Comments tab:

If the party doing the lab work is also the person who should be billed for the lab usage, then their information will go in the usage log as usual.

The Comments section is optional in this case.

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When you enter in the billing party’s information, then work done by any user on their behalf can be consolidated onto a single invoice.

In the below example, Michael Tarkanian was the user in the lab doing work that should be billed to Tom Eagar. Tom Eagar’s information is put into the Quickbase log, so if any other users conduct work for his project, all of the bills will go to Tom:

Examples

👨‍👩‍👧 EXAMPLE 1

Professor Bill Smith has 2 researchers using the MET lab for his project on particle synthesis. Professor Smith is going to be billed for all of the usage hours.

Researcher A used the lab for 1 hour, so will input in the MET lab usage log:

Researcher B used the lab for 3 hours, so will input in the MET usage log:

Name: Bill Smith

Email: smith@mit.edu

Lab: MET Lab

Hours: 1 hour

Hours: 3 hours

Comments: Researcher A; Particle synthesis project

Comments: Researcher B; Particle synthesis project

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Since Bill Smith’s information was put into the usage log for both researchers, when the monthly billing is done for the MET lab, Bill Smith will receive one invoice to smith@mit.edu with all of his billable hours.

🧍EXAMPLE 2

Jana Bourgis is using the SEM lab for their project on testing chemical reactants. They will cover the bill for their own lab usage.

Jana used the lab for 4 hours, so will input in the SEM lab usage log:

Name: Jana Bourgis

Email: bourgis@mit.edu

Lab: SEM Lab

Hours: 4 hours

[OPTIONAL] Comments: Reactant project

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Since Jana Bourgis is paying for their own use of the service center, they should enter in their own information into the usage log.

Please note this is only for external service center users. Internal MIT users can be logged as usual based on the usage party.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.

Logging external users in the Service Center app

As of January 2022, the following updates will be made to the use of service centers by outside organizations:

Examples

👨‍👩‍👧 EXAMPLE 1

🧍EXAMPLE 2

Please note this is only for external service center users. Internal MIT users can be logged as usual based on the usage party.