The budget is a key part of any grant application. There are many factors to consider, including costs for staff, travel, consumables, recruitment, equipment, facilities, subcontracting services, research data management, impact, and open access to name a few. Understanding the principles of full costing will help to calculate the true cost of a research project, ensuring the necessary financial resources. The task of this section is to put flesh on the most common issues of the project management and facilitate the preparation of the final project budget. The key budget categories encountered in the project management are as follows:
Overheads (indirect costs) – overhead is any expense incurred to support the project while not directly related to a specific activity or work packages. Overhead refers to the expenses not directly attributed to creating a project deliverable. It can be defined as a general cost connected with the functioning of the given institution being a project applicant. Examples of the indirect cost are the salary of the project manager and the cost of administration, electricity and operating cost (electricity, heating), accounting fees, insurance, telephone bills, and utilities. All types or categories of expenditure that cannot be accurately quantified and specifically identified to one or more EU-funded projects.
Consumables – category of direct costs incurred to support the project activities directly related to specific activities or work packages. Consumables are products that consumers use recurrently, i.e., items that “get used up” or discarded. For example, consumable office supplies are such products as paper, pens, file folders, post-it notes, and toner or ink cartridges. This is in contrast to capital goods or durable goods in the office, such as computers, fax machines, and other business machines or office furniture.
Personel costs – costs of employees in line with the employment/ work contract, and costs of natural persons working for the partner organization. An example of the staff costs is the salaries. Usually, all the components of the salaries are eligible including all kinds of social assurances and taxes which means that gross salary should be calculated into the project budget. Expenditure incurred for staff time used to deliver projects. Example – annual salary, national insurance, pension contributions, employer’s contributions for NI and pension, any other contractual payments included in the employee contract. Staff costs evidence: timesheets, payroll printouts, pay slips, bank statements.
Travel expenditures – direct costs associated with traveling to conduct project-related activities. The travel expenditures are eligible depending on the given project funding scheme. Usually, they are defined as the cheapest way of travel between two places evidenced by the flight tickets, bus tickets, and train tickets.
Subsistence costs – direct costs of stay outside of the usual place of work, e.g during project activities realized abroad due to secondments. The subsistence costs are based on lump sums depending upon the destination. Lump sums for a trip abroad are rarely updated and remain at the same level since 2013. (Rozporządzenie Ministra Pracy i Polityki Społecznej z dnia 29 stycznia 2013 r. w sprawie należności przysługujących pracownikowi zatrudnionemu w państwowej lub samorządowej jednostce sfery budżetowej z tytułu podróży służbowej).
Subcontracting services – direct project costs that cannot be handled internally. The subcontracting company and the provider work closely throughout the project, and the hiring party has a reasonable amount of control over the process.
Data management costs – direct costs of the administrative process that includes acquiring, validating, storing, protecting, and processing required data to ensure the accessibility, reliability, and timeliness of the data for its users.
Rozporządzenie Ministra Pracy i Polityki Społecznej z dnia 29.01.2013
