During a project, you have to make quarterly reports to the grant claims monitoring officer within your funding body i.e. Innovate UK or Horizon Europe, to make sure that you’re on target and on budget. Grant claims are made quarterly in arrears with the exact amount claimable measured by timesheets, invoices, and other spending evidence and should align with milestones based on the project plan that you presented at the start of the project. Quarterly reports support claim requests by evidencing the work completed in that quarter and explaining how that work fits the agreed project plan. This should include any explanations and reasoning of small deviations to plan and spend.
At the end of the project, you’ll need to complete a final report to confirm that you’ve completed the project as expected or as planned and this will need to be signed off by a monitoring officer.
It is possible to change the spending levels during the project – this could be spend per quarter or spend per cost category. This is done through a project change request. As part of the quarterly meetings, you will discuss progress and issues with your monitoring officer to identify if there are significant deviations anticipated or which require an official confirmation from the funding body.
The overall grant awarded to a project will never be increased. This is why it is important to set out a detailed plan from the application stage to make sure project costs are reasonable to meet the targeted project milestones. Additional spend is expected to be covered by the applying company or consortium.
Project extensions are generally only granted in extreme circumstances. If you think a project extension is needed you should first discuss with your monitoring officer who can help advise if a request is likely to be approved. All other options should be explored before a project extension, such as a change of approach to meet project end points.
At TBAT we have experienced project managers who are able to support clients through the grant claims process. This can include liaising with the monitoring officer, attending the quarterly meetings, drafting the quarterly reports, and pulling together the claim itself. We can also support project change requests and final reporting requirements. Please contact us.