Essentially, budget planning is one of the most crucial stages of the development of a Horizon Europe grant application. Your Horizon Europe budget is the prediction of expenses and the breakdown of costs that demonstrates the required resources for the proposed project and serves as a plan for funders to know how the involved parties will operate the project and spend money in every project phase. Budget calculation in Horizon Europe collaborative projects is never an easy task. When multiple stakeholders are involved in this process, it gets difficult to agree on the total budget and project duration.
So how can your proposal and grant application get a desirable outcome, given that it must present the justifications for the cost estimates required for the successful operation of the project?
Before starting the budgeting process, you should have a solid project work plan developed that can serve as the foundation. According to the responsibilities, all stakeholders can then propose a budget and resources required for the implementation of their activities. Since each partner’s budget calculation needs to be reviewed, negotiated, and approved (including repetitive change requests), the larger and more complex the project is, the more difficult it can be to manage this process. Though it can be tough to arrive at a final, agreed upon budget, there are many things you can do to make the whole process and its management easier for yourself and your partners.
Best practices for a successful budget calculation in Horizon Europe
Understand the expectations of project evaluators
What to ask yourself:
- What expectations need to be met?
- What does the project and the participants need to do to meet these expectations?
- How can I justify that the proposed budget is adequate enough in order to accomplish the goals of the collaborative project?
Prior to starting the budget calculation in Horizon Europe it’s important to ask yourself the questions above. A strong budget will seek to meet the expectations of its evaluators and prove that the budget and its funding is in line with the project objectives and goals. A good budget proves that you’d be able to effectively and efficiently manage funding to successfully accomplish the project goals. You’ll need to demonstrate to funders that you’ll be able to stay on target and follow through with your objectives; basically that your project is worthy of their support. The best way to do this is to make sure that costs are reasonable, transparent, allowable, and related to the research proposal.
Start the budget calculation process by examining and considering your project activities and their costs
What to ask yourself:
- What are the costs of the project activities?
It can be difficult to switch between goals and objectives to activities, but once the project outline is clear, planning the budget will become easier. One of the easiest and most logical ways to plan a budget for your proposal is to start estimating resources and costs to each of your project activities. This is why the first solid outline of your project schedule with activities and deliverables is a vital step before budget calculation.
Choose the right tool to prepare, modify, and manage your budget
What to ask yourself:
- What are the pros and cons of the tool I’m using?
- Is it reliable and trustworthy?
- How much error-prone manual work and double-checking do I still have to do?
- Can it handle the workload?
- Does it meet security and privacy requirements?
Tools like Excel are useful, but how often have you caught yourself adjusting the sheet with formulas and double-checking everything when working with Excel? Some of the downsides of spreadsheets are that they can’t handle issues with consistency and keeping data in sync, they can overload from adjustments and having too many versions from different partners, the data isn’t displayed in real-time, and there aren’t any privacy measures or safeguards against data loss. Consider switching to more powerful and advanced tools to get your budget to the submission stage as efficiently as possible.