You’ve done some good thinking through on this. It’s tricky stuff.
I think in the real world there would be a number of variables that would impact on exactly what is considered a cost. These are variables that are hard to pin down in a hypothetical. So let me give you an example.
I’m currently leading a faculty funded teaching and learning research project. My time is included in the budget for the project, but it is considered to be ‘in workload’, so we don’t get extra money to pay for it. It’s simply 20% of my time. The same is true for the other two academics on the project, who are each contributing 10% of their time. The staffing cost that actually costs us real cash is hiring research assistants to do the data collection and other pieces of work like transcribing interview recordings. So in the budget, we had two cost columns: one for in kind contribution (the $ amount that the % of our time costs) and one for the cash we were asking for to cover all the non in kind costs (primarily hiring research assistants). In your case, if you wanted to follow this kind of model, you could note % in kind contributions in the budget rationale/explanation free text field under the table, and just include the actual cold hard cash you’re asking for in the table itself (ie from what you’re saying, I think the only staffing that wouldn’t be covered by current staff would be the project manager, so that’s what I would expect to see in the table).
But having said all that… It is complex with a hypothetical so as long as you clearly explain what money you are asking for and what it will cover, we’ll be happy with that.
And I’m sorry for the slow reply. No matter how many times I whitelist the email address for the forum notifications, they end up in my spam. Gah! Feel free to ping me on Twitter if I don’t reply quickly.