Essentially, budget planning is one of the most crucial stages of the development of a Horizon Europe grant application. Your Horizon Europe proposal budget is a forecast of expenses and a breakdown of costs that demonstrates the required resources for the proposed project and serves as a plan for funders to understand how the involved parties will operate the project and spend money in every project phase. Budget calculation in Horizon Europe collaborative projects is never easy. When multiple stakeholders are involved in this process, it gets challenging to agree on the total budget and project duration.
So, how can your proposal and grant application achieve a desirable outcome, given that they must present the justifications for the cost estimates required for the project’s successful operation?
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 the resources required to implement 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 steps you can take to make the process and its management easier for you and your partners.
Best practices & top considerations for a successful budget calculation in Horizon Europe projects
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 to accomplish the goals of the collaborative project?
Before starting the budget calculation in Horizon Europe, it’s essential to ask yourself the questions above. A substantial budget will aim to meet its evaluators’ expectations and demonstrate that the budget and its funding align with the project objectives and goals. A reasonable budget indicates that you can effectively and efficiently manage financing to 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 challenging to shift from goals and objectives to activities, but once the project outline is clear, budget planning will become easier. One of the easiest and most logical ways to prepare a budget for your proposal is to start estimating resources and costs for each of your project activities. This is why the first solid outline of your project schedule, including 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 helpful, but how often have you caught yourself adjusting the sheet with formulas and double-checking everything when working with Excel? Some downsides of spreadsheets are that they can’t maintain consistency or keep data in sync, they can overload with adjustments and too many versions from different partners, the data isn’t displayed in real time, and there are no 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.
