Webinar on error rate reduction

good morning everybody and welcome to this horizon 2020 webinar on how to avoid personal cost in horizon 2020 i don't know if i am on you are perfect thank you very much so my name is manuel romaris i'm training coordinator for horizon 2020 and today i will guide you through the different aspects of this webinar first i would like to apologize because peter harwich the head of unit of the common implementation center cannot be here today so i will try to replace him and i have for that actually two colleagues that are working in the common implementation center and are taking care of the technical aspects that's olivier margan that you heard already and emmanuel crowling is also taking care of the slider in addition i have two other colleagues that i will introduce later that we do the presentations actually we have two presentations two very short presentations these are about 20 minutes presentations one on the legal aspects and the other one on more audit aspects is most common errors and how to avoid them so we will go to these two presentations 20 minutes each 40 minutes in total more or less and after we will have the questions that will go through slido as you have seen in the webpage you have a code for slider.com and the code is costs 2020 course is within less than cos ts 2020 can be lower or upper case and it's all together and please before you can also introduce questions from right now but please before introducing questions have a look at the previous questions and if there is a similar question like it so at the end we will go through the different questions we have in the number in order of number of likes so if you have a similar questions don't repeat it just like the previous one so out of the two presentations that we have today the first one is the rules for declaring personal course and here we will have a look at the more legal aspects we have for that with us isabella hua isabel is a lawyer the common implementation center isabel the floor is yours so good morning everyone so i'm indeed isabella i work in the common legal support service where we provide legal support for the implementation of framework programs for research and innovation and notably horizon 2020 so this morning i'm going to speak to you about uh the legal aspects of personal costs and notably uh personal costs are important because they're usually a large part of grants under horizon 2020 so it's important to know important to know how to declare them and how to avoid errors in the declaration of personal costs so today in this perspective we're going to focus on uh how to declare personal costs in the safest way and i mean safest way in the sense that under horizon 2020 we offer a larger rather large menu of options to declare personal costs and to some extent beneficiaries can choose among these options but they need to grasp and understand fully under which conditions they need to fulfill to use one or the other options and among these options some are more complex some are simpler so we're going to focus and point you today towards the simpler options to declare personal costs and now i will uh share with you my presentation so can you see it yes it's very good okay do you see any boxes or is there no it's perfectly nice good so um first key message that i would like you to take with you today is that uh there are several framework programs and each one has its own rules so today we're going to talk about horizon 2020 so you see that there were successive framework programs for research and innovation there was fp7 that started in 2007 horizon 2020 in 2014 and now in 2021 it's a new program which is starting which is horizon europe however you also see that there are overlaps between these periods and so uh though this year horizon europe is starting there are ongoing actions on the horizon 2020 which are ongoing and continuing for several years and these actions at the horizon 2020 continue to be subject to the rules of horizon 2020 so it's important to know that you are applying the horizon 2020 rules and i also would like to ensure you that what you are doing today by strengthening your or acquiring knowledge on horizon 2020 is still very useful because these uh our ongoing actions will continue for one two three years and even after that in the horizon 2020 there can be audits on horizon 2020 actions in 2025 26 or even 27. so it's uh useful and very worth to have more information on horizon 2020 at this stage and under horizon 2020 this morning we're going to focus on the grants that reimburse actual costs so that's real costs and that's in opposition to grants that reimburse differently on the basis of lump sums or a unit cost for example you have the marissa reactions which are based on unit costs and we're not going to deal with them today because they are simpler at the stage of reporting personal costs because they because they are based on fixed amounts so they are less error prone than the variety that you can find under uh grants that reimburse real cost actual costs and also uh the grants that reimburse actual costs are the vast majority under horizon 2020. um so now to the heart of the subject uh watch are personal costs so basically they cost for the time that a person works on a horizon 2020 action and which cases can go under personal costs so uh the first case is of course the case of employees so person who work under an employment contract with the beneficiary the second case is a seconded staff so that is staff which is seconded or contributed by another legal entity to a beneficiary and this is quite often the case for public bodies or for universities in which staff is paid by the government for example example then the third big case and maybe there are quite a few of you today it's uh the case of small and medium-sized enterprise of which the owner is working on the action so we will see later how um the owner can declare the cost notably if the owner does not receive a salary from the sme and the fourth case is um for the category of other persons working under other types of contracts and that's notably the case of consultants and here the question is to know whether they can fall under personal costs or if they may fall under another cost category so we will have more details on these categories specific cases uh later on in the presentation so here uh about finding your way in personal course um there's a lot of information on this slide and i don't want to scare you with this slide here the idea is to show you this bus menu of options that i mentioned earlier so um beneficiaries can do some extend choose among them and uh some are more complex but can also be useful to certain beneficiaries notably experimented beneficiaries who understand the conditions to apply certain uh options but here what we have identified and what you can see in blue green are the simpler options to uh declare your personal costs and so they form a simple path to declare your personal costs now about the calculation of personal costs and where are the main aspects to avoid errors so this is basically the formula to declare your personal cost you can find it in your grant agreement under article 62a and so you multiply the number of hours worked on the action by an hourly rate so for the hours worked on the action you need time records and for the hourly rate you don't need to come up with a way to calculate it the formula to determine your hourly rate is also displayed and laid down in your grant agreement in the article 62a and you have to apply this formula to calculate the hourly rate now i'm going to explain in more details the two elements of this formula the hours worked on the action uh what we want to know and what you need to declare are the hours really worked on the project so you cannot declare budgeted time in this respect budgeted time is what you can estimate at the beginning of the of the action when you are making your budget and there are often deviations between the time when you are making the budget and the time when we implement the action and what we want to know at the time of reporting and notably when you report personal costs is uh the work was really done and so the hours that were really worked on the act on the action in the same line you cannot declare estimated time and you cannot either declare allocated time and in this respect you cannot declare a percentage of the time worked by a person and you cannot use a percentage even if there is a percentage indicated in the work contract of the person it sometimes happened that you have a contract indicating that a person will work a certain percentage on the on a project and this is fine from the uh from the point of view of a contract but but of a work contract but when it comes to reporting personal costs under horizon 2020 we want the real number of hours and so what you need to do is you need to have time records and that's timesheets um so this is a general principle the only exception when you don't need to use timesheets is when a person works exclusively on the action and then this person for this person you can use a declaration of exclusive work on the action but you have to be careful with the use of this uh declaration of exclusive view work on the action because you can only use one per reporting period and the regional reporting periods are usually quite long usually 18 months and the declaration on exclusive work must cover an uninterrupted period so if you have a worker that is not always working exclusively on the action you cannot really use this declaration and you must use timesheets about what you use what we want to see in timesheets there are minimum requirements and they are listed in a document which is called the annotated model grant agreement i will refer to this document several times that as it is a very useful document with the explanations on the articles of the grant agreement so the this document provides you the list of the minimum requirements that we want to see in timesheets and that includes notably the number and name of the of the project the identification of the beneficiary the number of hours worked on the action and a mention of the action task to which they were related and of course the name signature of the person working and their uh signature uh name of the supervisor and the uh timesheets must be signed at least monthly um so that's the most important information about timesheets and uh about the part of the formula which concerns the hours worked on the action now the other part of the formula is the hourly rate so you see here we have another formula to calculate the hourly rate again this formula is displayed in your grant agreement to do the article 62a um so you have to to calculate the hour rate you have to take the personal cost the one recorded in your accounts and you divide them by productive hours so in more details um about the numerator the personal cost so what can you include in the personal costs you can include obviously salaries uh uh as well as the social security contributions so that the mandatory employer and employee contributions as well as taxes and you can can also include other costs um included in remuneration to the extent that they arise from a national labor law or collective labor agreement or the work contract or the employment contract that for instance could be a fee for complementary health insurance but you cannot include in these other costs things like an arbitrary bonus and that would be a bonus that is not in line with the usual practice remuneration practice of the beneficiary or which is not based on objective conditions now about the denominator the productive hours um this is a an area where you have options that among which you can choose so i refer to the tree the big three of options that i showed you earlier and here we're going to point you to the simpler option to declare personal costs is to use as predictive hours a fixed number per year and this we have fixed this number so it's the same number for everyone it's 1720 hours so this number uh does not change whether the person has over time or has leave a sick leave even longer cleave the only exception is there is parental leave and also uh the if the person has is working part time or has not worked the full year then you do uh can do a pohata of this fixed number but otherwise it's the fixed number 1720 hours per year then the other two options which we will not detail today for productive hours are individual uh productive hours calculated at the level of each individual worker and the other options are standard um annual productive hours based on the standard practice of the beneficiary um still about the hourly rate we're going to see now how often you need to calculate it so here there are two possibilities and the one that we are putting forwards as the simpler uh possible way to calculate your personal cost is to do the calculation of the hourly rate once per year and here we mean once per full financial year and it's your own financial year um so for each person you need to do this for each version the calculation of the personal cost divided by the predictive hours for each person once a year now you see a little warning under the possibility of the calculation and annual calculation and that's for the situation when the reporting period ends in the middle of a financial year or in during your financial year for instance if the next your next reporting period is ending in march 2022 so at that point if your financial year runs from january to december in march you will not have the full figures for 2022. so in this case you have to use the hourly rate that you calculated in the last closed financial year and in my example of a reporting period uh ending in march 2022 it would mean that to calculate the personal month's personal personal costs for the month of january february and march 2022 you would apply the hourly rate that you calculated for 2021. apart from that the this is the simpler option notably because uh you only have to do the calculation once per year now the other possibility of the frequency to calculate the hourly rate is monthly so we think it's more complex and more error-prone mostly because you have to do this calculation 12 times per year for each person and they are more complex aspect also because when there is a part of the remuneration that is generated over a longer period than one month you cannot simply add all the remuneration in the month where you pay it but you have to calculate the entire entitlement per month and apply the the prata per month the rules also to calculate um the the the hours of the productive hours and to how to declare personal costs when there is parental leave is more complex under uh calculation per month so we recommend rather the calculation per year now we have seen most of the elements concerning the calculation and the applications of the formulas to calculate personal costs so you have made this multiplication of the hours worked by an hourly rate and you obtain a result and at this stage uh the still a check that you should do is to check that you're on the result of your multiplication is not above two ceilings so we call this the double ceiling rule um this uh ceilings are to ensure that you are not declaring more than uh what you incurred and they are the ceilings are linked to the numbers that you used to calculate your hourly rate so um you cannot declare more hours uh whereas the hours that you worked on the action that the number of productive hours that you used in the calculation of your hourly rate and similarly you cannot declare more costs and there i mean you cannot claim more costs for reimbursement by the grant than the personal costs that are recorded in your accounts and that you use to calculate your hourly rate and these two ceilings apply per person per year and for all eu and uranium brands and if you see that the result of your multiplication is above one of these ceilings you simply use the ceiling as a capping and you don't declare above the ceiling so now we've seen all the main elements uh and more areas where there may be areas to avoid um still i would like i would like to point you to a tool that can help you further with the declaration of personal costs and this is the personal cost wizard it's a tool which is integrated in the reporting module so when you are submitting your financial statements at the end of the your reporting period what you can see on the screen is the entry point in the portal when you are reporting your personal costs you have the wizard which can help you for the calculation by applying the options of your choice and also help you to check the double sea level and now i'm just going to um mention to you three specific cases about related to personal costs the first one is the situation where a beneficiary would ask i want to pay to my employee more than their normal salary for their work in this prestigious grant so um if the question does not ring a bell for you it is presumably because you're not at all concerned by this specific case this specific case is uh find found very often in certain countries and is quasi and existent in other countries but for those who those who are concerned by this question uh we would then answer uh well if you do this paying more only for the horizon 2020 grant we cannot accept it and this is a principle that applies across the board you must use to declare your costs on the horizon 2020 your usual uh accounting practices so you cannot use uh calculate your cost in a very specific way just to declare the cost in the horizon 2020 but if you would answer to that that you do this practice of paying more than normal for all prestigious grant then indeed it exists in uh certain countries that you have this uh way of remembering where it depends on the type of activity and the employee will receive a different remuneration depending on the type of activity and for example participation in a prestigious grant but not only the horizon 2020 grams and then we would identify that this type of remuneration is called project based remuneration and here the beneficiary is having this little uh scared emoji because indeed it is one of the complex cases uh in the declaration of personal costs and there we really advise you to look into the annotated model grant agreement to see how to declare uh personal costs when you have project-based remuneration and we cannot cover it today because there's too many details to explain and now i'm switching to another specific case which is much simpler and this is the case when the owner of a small and medium-sized enterprise does not get get a salary from this uh the sme first of all i just want to clarify that if the owner of an sme does receive a salary then it's not a specific case it's just false in the calculation that we have seen at the beginning of the presentation but if the owner does not receive a salary then to declare personal costs uh you must use a unit cost which we have fixed and there is also a country coefficient corrections uh depending on the country where the sme is established the calculation and there is uh automatic in the reporting system so it's it's very simple and you an owner of an sme that does not receive a salary has to use this unit cost even if it uh it is compensated by uh other means that such as dividends or uh service contract then you cannot use another way to declare personal costs than this unit cost for the sme owner without a salary and then the third specific case that i wanted to mention this morning is the case of consultants so a person who is not an employee not working under an employment contract under another type of contract and we have seen that there has been a multiplication of other types of contract that we call also quasi-subordinate contracts and there the question is to know whether they can fall under personal costs if they do they would be under a specific category which which is um in the article 6282 of your grant which is for uh direct contracts between a natural person and a beneficiary there are several conditions for the cost of a consultant to fall under this category of personal costs and one of the main conditions is that you need to have a direct contract between the natural person and the beneficiary so if there is an intermediary such as a temporary work agency it cannot fall under this category and it cannot fall under personal costs another another of the main conditions uh to be under this category personal cost is that the consultant must work under conditions which are similar to those other employees notably in their organization of the work in tasks the right to telework and also in terms of remuneration having a similar level of remuneration and also having remuneration which is based on working time rather than delivering output so if your consultant fulfills these conditions it can fall under and be declared the cost can be declared under personal costs if the consultant does not fulfill the conditions then it does not mean that you cannot declare costs for these consultants it means that the costs may fall under other categories of costs notably contracts or possibly subcontracts but these categories of course have their own eligibility conditions and notably that the contracts must be awarded in a manner ensuring best value for money and without conflict of interest um so now we have covered all the points that i wanted to mention i will just to point you to further sources for further information um so firstly there is the annotated model grant agreement which i mentioned several times so it is a very helpful document with explanations and lots of details but also lots of explanations it's um presumably you can find there the answers to nearly all your questions it's organized by articles and you could also use the search function to if you're interested in a specific word that's a way to find explanations on a specific aspect and if you want to have information on more technical or practical aspect of the grant management then you have the online manual and if you didn't find answers in these two documents you can submit your questions to uh two places not first of all the network of national contact points so these are people in your country who know your uh legislative framework who speak your language but who are also experts in horizon 2020 and we meet with them regularly to exchange and keep updated and the other way to submit a question if you have one is the research inquiry service which um under which your questions will be sent to the commission and answered by colleagues in the commission and now i thank you for your attention and i give the flow back to manuel thank you very much isabel actually i would like to say that at the beginning of this page where you are watching this webinar there are plenty of links actually to the different documents including including the annotated grant agreement so we are already receiving plenty of questions for you isabel but we will deal with them at the very end so if you can wait a little bit and we have now soren serban who will introduce us with the most common errors and how to avoid them good morning soaring soreness and auditor in the common implementation center good morning good morning everybody i'll try to share my screen can you see the presentation yes we can okay thank you very much so good morning um as manuel was saying i'm working in the common audit service i'm an auditor financial editor and we are dealing with um to carry on the audits for ryzen 2020 grants basically um this presentation will be about how to how do we check and what what advices we can give you in order to to avoid errors with financial audits um first of all just a big small a smaller general presentation about errors what why do they occur in general of course the first main justification is because of misunderstanding of the rules and i think the previous presentation of my colleague isabel try to help in that respect and the second is about lack of attention to details to the detail of the provisions of the grant agreement sometimes the the provisions in the grant agreements are very very specific or much very clear and you have to to to see and to look for these details and eventually also of course the intentionality now um about the consequence of errors for beneficiaries the first [Music] main consequence is the fact that the available funding is not used optimally and okay this is obviously adverse to the beneficiaries and this may also some some of the errors may also lead to recoveries so to recuperate of course paid to beneficiaries for the european commission institutions and services the errors could bring scrutiny scrutiny of the budgetary authority and the european court of auditors this could increase the error rate because there is a calculation of an overall error rate as well for the program whereas in 2020 and increase of course the exposed political efforts and and of course an impact on the corrective measures that could be taken in order to decrease the error rates so overall the error rate calculation is is done as follows from the population of paid financial statements we are drawing a sample random sample a sample um and from that sample we will calculate an error rate which is uh basically to make it in a simple way the sum of negative adjustments divided by the sum of audited adjustments per amount from the actions the purpose one of the purposes as well of the audit records is to assess the reality regularity of horizon 2020 project payments and to calculate also so-called residual error rate that should be kept as at an acceptable level meaning that the error rate remains in other monolithic plans and the general control objective is to get the residual level rate as close as possible to two percent without necessarily expecting it to be uh to get under two percent now the main detect barriers that we see in financial audits um horizon 2020 linked to personal costs are due mainly to incorrect product divorce calculation so i will come to the later on to the next slide we will take this one by one but basically the main type of errors are the productive hours which are incorrectly calculated the remuneration cost for example estimated but other reasons as well but which has to do with the upper part of the calculation and we will speak about it in the next slide the incorrect time working on the action plan so this has to do with the first part of the equation of the calculation of personal cost and other of course for example and especially unreliable or missing timesheets to calculate the number of dollars on the action i was saying about the the formula to calculate personal cost which my colleague is about already explained i think quite in detail but presenting going through this i think we will we can easily easily see how what kind of errors we detect in in the completion of personal cost so first of all uh the hours worked is the first part the numerator is the total personal cost and the denominator the productive hours option one two three the second part of the equation is the so-called w rate and the first part is the hour's point so if we look first of all at the time recording meaning the first part of the equation the number of hours left on the action the main errors that we see or sources of errors let's put it this way are for example the inconsistency with the hre chords and here i think we should mention that um in general the hours declared should be in accordance with the hr meaning for example the absences the holidays the bank holidays or other data that we have in the hr reports for example termination of a contract or a recruitment or a new person should of course be consistent with the information in the temporary system and further also to the information declared in the financial statements um the timesheets time recording should contain of course probably dated and signed timesheets this is part of the minimum conditions of course and and has to do with the appropriateness and sufficiency of the uh what it takes the hours should not be in excess of the full-time equivalent this has to do with the so-called double silly explain earlier by my colleague obviously if you use the number of hours to be worked if you use option one for example and you declare more than 1720 hours then you will have there is an error to be corrected also if you declare a personal cost an amount of personal cost per person and then in the accounting you have a lower amount for the personal cost of that person then we also are reaching the double ceiling the similar levels and then we also have another error and then of course uh the sufficiency in terms of information of the evidence which should be verifiable auditable and available the sufficiency has to has to do with the quantity of evidence available so um the grant agreement is very specific in that regard about the quantity of evidence that you should keep in case of an audit or inspection or other type of reviews of checks in general uh but also about the appropriateness of this evidence which has to do with the quality of the evidence meaning it should be relevant for the objectives of the checks and for the um overall objective of the rules or establishing the grant agreement now the merits when we talk about the first part of the equation the number of hours the time for the system that provides this number of hours worked for the action and then the second part is the numerator of the calculation of the rate meaning the the personal cost individual or a category will not enter into the details depending on the type of calculation but the personal cost calculated and how to avoid errors here so first of all i would like to clarify that the personal costs here the hourly rate could be calculated per person or an average so of course if you have a normally rate individual or you're right then the personal cost of goals would be for each person separately and if you have average personal cost and the personal cost refers to a category of course yeah the cost center for example the department et cetera so the personal cost here in order to avoid having errors personal cost should be should include the salaries so-called good salaries of gross salaries the social security contributions so the employers and employees social security contributions of course the employer's social security contributions are normally included in the gross good salaries please don't uh don't declare them twice they are already there and also other taxes and costs included in their veneration but of course please pay attention here if they arise for national law or employment countries there are some conditions and as soon as you go with some additional costs to declare we strongly advise you to have a look in the analytic interview and then to check whether these costs are eligible or to be considered eligible as a best practice please do not include any ineligible item so items that are in articles 6.5 occupant agreement basically entertainment cost or other type of sports that are considered ineligible not linked to the action and so on or any other costs that are already declared included in other budgets of costco techniques for example in direct cost or other type of post-travel cost equipment etc obviously for double um for avoiding double funding yeah deploying the same with the same cost twice so that's about the upper part of the calculation on the hourly rate now regarding the part which is under the about the denominator of course we come back to the three options to calculate productive ops and here um the option one is obviously a strong advice to go through because it is applicable in all situations and um you must also use this option if the employment contract does not specify working time conditions or if the general determined so the second option um you must use the formula um please pay attention to the overtime that should be declared as well in order to take it into account in order to avoid of course once again double funding and um also to double check the conditions in the analytic grant agreement especially linked to the consistency to the fact that it should be applied consistently the same condition applies also to option three this should be applied consistently this should be also according to beneficiaries usual cost accounting practices and uh we must respect the threshold of 90 of the standard annual workable hours so the workable is not included in the so-called non-productive laws and these are very well explained in the annotated interview but the advice obviously would be to go for option one which which is easier in practice to apply now some some other some additional machines how to avoid errors but you can make sure that the time charge to the project is correct um now this time comes from the time sheets uh time coding system you have an electronic one and the number of hours declared on the project you should ensure that the number of words between the project are the same as the number of hours worked for the project as a registered in the timesheet so basically the timesheets coincide are the same the number opposing punches is the same as the number of words declared for the calculation of the personal constants explained very well the time records meet the grant agreement conditions now there are six million conditions and please pay attention to them because um this has to do with sufficiency of the evidence of the audit evidence and they are required from the grant agreement um i'm not entering the six conditions but today they are basically the number of hours of reaction to the beneficiary's name full name supervisor from them and signature employee working for the action name and signature and date and so on and then another advice is to to to check the determination the numerator is correct yeah meaning that for example we don't have an eligible cost as explained earlier or that any specificities if you go to add additional cost are really double checked against very useful guidelines in the united stand agreement okay bonuses as well for example are really not arbitrary and the last financial year is applied and things like that and of course for the denominator the productive words in the denominator are correct uh depending on the options used um also pay attention if you use monthly calculation not to use option two this is very also very well explained in the grant agreement to avoid errors now personal cost formula reconciles of course if you calculate the personal cost by the number of hours multiplied by the hourly rate of course we should you should also check arithmetical accuracy before before submitting the financial statement um it's it still happens uh there may be multiple uh reasons why but we still find errors of reconciliation of wrong calculation for different reasons so that's that's really very useful to undermine and also to double check the transaction listing reconciles so we will make an extraction from the accounting system to ensure that what you declare is really in accordance with the transactions that you have basically that the costs you declare are really incurred by you in the accounting the employment contracts are in place for those employees that have employment contracts if they are there is unemployment contract then you have to uh for developing the united states agreement to to have to to see where how how this uh should be declared either as for example as an owners with molecular weights additional structural rates or natural persons with direct control and so on so as soon as you don't have an employment contract then you should really pay attention and further look how to declare the cost in the financial statements for the exchange rate also this is especially for for beneficiaries that uh have a county which are not reported in europe please pay attention because there is an exchange rate stipulated by the annotated by the grant agreement to be followed and then of course the final test is to to perform all these checks before you submit your financial statement to the european commission services thank you for your attention and participation besides the the the reference the reference documents that the colleagues already put forward and that they are also listed in the site i think you should you can also further go to the audit program which is published verizon 2020 which you can use as well in case you would like to double check or to to check yourself if your system and horizon 20 in case of an audit for example to to to do the these checks uh this is published or you can also use it to see what an auditor would check in case of another thank you very much back to human right thank you very much serene i just want to remind everybody that you can still ask questions and like the questions that are already asked there or written in slido we have all the presentations at the very beginning of this webpage the event web page so you can see there are the presentations download them and also there will be the recording after this event there will be the recording so if you can watch again isabel and soaring over and over again you are welcome to do so if you have any questions you know that you have also the research enquiry service afterwards but now we are going to go directly to the questions and i'm waiting for olivier and manuel to put the slider session at the bottom of this webpage so we can go directly to the to these questions and i have to say that we have a new colleague joining for the answering the question that's median gomez martello she's a lawyer she's a head of sector in the common implementations center thank you very much emilian for being here and helping us with the questions so i'm going to start already reading the questions while they appear here inside they don't appear for me now olivia or manuel i don't know if they appear for everybody but in any case i have the slider session open and the first question i have it's is the typical question about the the timesheet actually timesheet is giving a lot of problems to everybody so could you explain the new timesheet format and who wants to answer that isabel yes i can i can start so um i'm not sure about this question for a new timesheet format the the timesheet format changed in the middle of the program there was a several years ago and actually uh when i'm talking about a format there isn't a compulsory format the only requirement is that your time recording system complies with the minimum requirements which are listed in the annotated model grant agreement however what we propose also in the annotated grant agreement is a model term a template that you can use but that is optional if for instance you don't have your own recording system or it doesn't fulfill the minimum requirements we have this uh template that is accessible via a link in the annotated model grant agreement under article 18 on uh keeping records and of course this template uh if you fulfill it follow this template it fulfills the minimum requirements for time recording perfect thank you very much we seem to have a small technical problem we cannot see the slider on the event webpage olivia and manuel are working on that but we continue actually with the page on slider directly slider.com i want to remind you that the code actually to ask questions is costs with unless at the end 2020. so next question we have 30 likes here it is possible to declare time work on weekends in the time sheets as you know many people are working on long experiments over the weekend or that depends on the organization's internal rules that's also you isabel so you need to decline to declare all hours worked on the on the project however uh the big caveat here is that you can only declare costs which are in line with national legislation on working time and the collective labor agreement and the employment contract so it's in this limit that you can declare time worked on the action thank you next question what if we end up working more hours than plan in some of the tasks so um this is often the case that there are deviations between uh what was uh estimated at the time of making the budget and what happened in the implementation of the project at the time of reporting uh it's actually more in the reporting of the resources and the effort uh in in personal month that you would explain the deviations uh compared to what was estimated at the beginning and this is uh to be discussed with the project officer to to to some extent the deviations are acceptable when they are justified um and um the only limit to that is that uh there is the question also the budget this can entail uh transfers in the budget when it transfers most of the transfers can be done without an amendment as long as you are not uh changing the description of the tasks which are in the annex one of your grant agreement uh and also the ultimate limit to all to such changes uh is that the maximum grant amount which is indicated in your grant agreement can not be increased thank you very much actually uh apparently the problem i have that i cannot see the slide obsession is that because my cookies are disabled so apparently it's only my problem but in any case if you have the same problem please know that you have to admit the cookies in your in your browser so next question is benjamin sierra navarro thank you ben humming for putting your name it's always nice to have an end behind our salaries include retribution in kind such as medical insurance transport etc can these concepts be considered as part of the personal cost so i can start but then maybe sohin will want to complete the answer so we indicated that in the personal cost that you can use to calculate the hourly rate you can put of course the salaries but also other items of the remuneration if they arise from the national legislation or collective labor agreement or the or the employment contract so this can be for instance uh medical insurance uh and for other uh aspects uh you have to also ensure that they comply with your um usual cost accounting practices and that they are registered in your accounts as personal costs i don't know if sohind you want to add something on this thank you no i mean you you explain it very well for the especially for other so-called entire narration you should really see whether this remuneration this is generation first of all and this is really perceived by the applicable employment contract national law or labor agreement thank you sarin thank you isabel and the next one is probably for you isabel in horizon 2020 we have to declare hours rounded up how can we do simultaneously to declare all of our hours in the given year [Music] um so today we're not going to focus too much on horizon europe but indeed there is a change in the way of reporting costs which will be based on a daily rate um if you have a time recording system and that you record your hours uh and you and you will continue to use your time recording system independently of the projects on which you are working you can use these hours to declare your personal cost on the horizon 2020 and there will be ways and there are ways to convert the hours into days for horizon europe actually if you're interested in further information that's already available on the portal under the horizon europe section a pre-draft of annotations on the horizon europe model grant agreement where these conversion rules of hours and two days are explained thank you next one i think is also for you regarding the annual rate calculation in the case of a new employee how do we calculate the hourly rate based on the last financial year so this question is absolutely spot on because this is a specific case and indeed if you recruited a new employee in the ongoing financial year you don't have any figures for this employee in the last close financial year so this is an exception to the last close financial year and for these employees you use the figures of the ongoing financial year and how do we calculate the person months um well personal month i first need to explain that the notion of person months does not belong to the reporting of personal costs this notion of person month you only use it in the reporting when you are explaining the resources that you use for the action tasks but they do not it's not at all included in the calculation of personal costs and uh as for calculating person month this is not defined by us we do not uh we have not fixed any rules on how to determine personal month it's up to your own way of calculating calculating personal months thank you next question is from julia ferrando if the bonus is included on their contract is it valid that's probably for you also um i think that with such questions we don't have enough information to know if a bonus is uh eligible um as i indicated in the presentation anything that is like an arbitrary bonus will not be eligible so the the main aspect is that it is considered as arbitrary if it does not follow the usual accounting practices of the beneficiary and also if it's not based on objective conditions so it's not any bonus that can be considered as eligible but if the bonus arises from the work contract and is objective um and then we have to see if it it can be eligible and then you have to see if it falls in what we call basic remuneration and that's the way to calculate personal costs that i explained in their in the presentation or whether it's the type of project based remuneration which is the specific case that i mentioned at the end where there is different a different level of remuneration for different type of activity and there is another way of calculating but it may still be valid uh the only thing to that i can specify at this point if it's project-based remuneration is that anything that would fall under additional remuneration in this framework is only eligible for nonprofit entities and up to a ceiling of 8000 euros per year per person we have another question about timesheets what if our company does not record time hours um so here the very strong message is that the number of hours that you're going to declare must be supported by reliable records and if they are not then the personal costs are not eligible so if you don't have your own system we can advise you to uh simply look for the template that is available in the annotated model grant agreement it's a very short and simple template so it's uh useful in particular for those who don't have a time recording system thank you that's clear enough so i have two questions here that are floating with 116 likes now what about digital time recording since we have already talked about that so um about the you can have an electronic uh time recording system and there are conditions that the system must fulfill and actually they are detailed in the annotated model grant agreement under article 18 but if i remember where they are mainly that you need to have electronic identity of their person and linked to um with a secured manner and secured with manager rights which are secured and an auditable log and um so i think that's about the three conditions that the electronic system must comply with but for further information if you want to be sure it's in the annotated model grant agreement i'm just checking if i don't have the information here so this the signature is electronic and it must be linked to the electronic identity with a password um and must be linked to electronic validation data with secure process and an auditable log there perfect thank you so next question is when do they have to ask for a cf space audit when they reach the 325 000 ceiling or at the end of the project so this is a question which is uh outside personal costs it's about reporting and it concerns uh all the costs so that it's uh when so you have to reach the threshold uh that's when your uh contribution requested contribution for certain costs is above this ceiling of 325 000 euros but for the time when you submit the cfs this is always with the final report and actually doesn't prevent you from making two for example two cfs if you want to make one for the first part and one for the second part but you can only submit the cfs and also submit costs to have the cfs in the final report not uh in an intermediary reporting period because then the the cost would not be accepted thank you and there is another one about personal costs here is the first day of the month is a sunday do you consider a whole month of personal cost or not uh i don't think it has any incidents you're going to calc we're going to calculate the number of hours you that you work during the month and uh and perhaps you will be in the case of a monthly uh hourly rate and you will calculate your number of productive hours for the month so for me maybe i don't get the question but they wouldn't have an impact thank you in order to calculate the hourly rate do we use the remuneration of the previous year or of the current year so there we are talking about a calculation of the hourly rate per year um so for you use the hourly rate of the full financial year so when you have the figures of the full financial year for example when you have when you will have them you have them now for 2020 so when you are reporting costs for uh worked done in 2020 you can now use the full financial year 2020 because you have all the information for 2020. if you are have to report um in 2021 let's say in october 2021 if your financial year runs from january to december you are in a situation where you don't have the four figures in 200 for 2021 so in this case for the month of 2021 for which you need to report you would use the figures of 2020 and so the hourly rate that you calculated for 2020. and the next question it's a very specific case about maternity leave the costs during maternity leave are first booked in the project and pay later by the by the health insurance first we they declare actually and adjust them in the next period is that okay um so i will first uh explain about what you can do for parental leave so if you are calculating your hourly rate uh per year you can de deduct the time spent on pareto leave from the productive hours that you use to calculate the uh hourly rate and about the for example salaries or contributions that the beneficiary may have paid during their parental here maternity leave you can include it in the cost if uh this compulsory to pay these uh salaries and contributions uh according to a national law or collective labor agreement and only also if the cost uh is really incurred by the by the beneficiary and is not later reimbursed to the beneficiary so then if it's later reimbursed beneficiary it's not an eligible costs and if you have declared it whereas it's not an eligible cost indeed you have the possibility to correct this as an adjustment that you do in the next reporting period thank you i just want to remind everybody that we have reached one hour of webinar and we intended to stay until noon until 12 answering questions for you provided there are questions of course and the next one will the use of the personal course wizard become compulsory um i'm perhaps not the best person uh to know about that i don't have colleagues from uh agent remove not to my to my knowledge no it's it's a tool that's helping and that's available for if you want to use it but i'm not aware that it would become compulsory perfect thank you pm cost divides the annual cost by 11 and monthly cost divides by 12. this creates confusion should we use pn or monthly cost for proposal budget calculation um so i'm not sure that i fully understand the question i guess this is part of your practice of this uh beneficiary to calculate person months um at the budget stage indeed you're going to use some person month but you will have to put amounts in their um personal costs in your budget um i'm not sure how to answer the only thing i can say is that what you put in the budget is an estimation and it doesn't have to be fixed then you are still have the possibility as i explained to some extent have deviations or transfers if it's not correspond exactly to what you budgeted if i may add yes as a best practice uh from another perspective i think it's useful to to use your usual practice or if you don't have one um once you can use one of the the options uh the grant agreement uh i'm saying this in the sense that the pro a project or to calculate the project demand cost you will divide a personal cost in the numerator by a denominator the denominator would be the standard productive hours or one of the options to calculate productivores and the numerator of course the personal cost of that person now of course when we talk about 11 or 12 reproductive roles in general do not include the holidays yeah so of course normally it's 11 so as a best practice you may calculate consistently the cost either for the for the budgeting purposes in person months or for the calculation of the reporting at the end by using more or less the same calculation along both hourly rates here it's just that the granularity of the calculation is not hourly rate it's monthly rate so it's small as the same but the presidential consistency between both okay [Music] thank you sorry here we have another question that is i'm not sure is really related to this webinar how do you manage extensions in our projects isabel do you want to take it because that's a bigger question yes this concerns uh so i guess this would be a request to modify the duration of the action and then this requires an amendment you have to make a request for an amendment and see if it's obtained i guess you would have to need justifications for the amendment to to ask for an extension of the duration thank you we have a colleague in maternity leave the whole year 2021 which will be her annual rate or for financial reports in 2022. actually so this is the the problem comes from if the the reporting periods end in 2022 you don't have the full or full numbers for 2022 and so which uh rate are going to apply there is nothing in 2021 i have a doubt maybe it's considered as a new employee but maybe sohind you know if you go back to 2020 or if it's a new employee in 2022 i i didn't saw this situation in practice most probably even if there is no available data for the last uh for the year 2021 most probably you will have available data for the year before for example the idea is to have obviously a full close closed financial year in order to calculate the hourly rate so maybe the best practice would be to use the previous year okay thank you and can the pi sign all the time sheets including his or her um so you the timesheet needs to be signed by a supervisor as well as the person who is working it's only in very specific cases where it's a one-person company and there's absolutely no supervisor that may be the same there's only the signature of the person working but a pi just like that without knowing the context we cannot say yes okay can we declare a trainee um well um first of all you have to only declare um personal costs in compliance with national law and when it comes to students or phd et cetera the conditions to declare personal costs are first of all that their contract because they need a contract is work oriented and not training oriented and then you also need to ensure that the allocation of task is in line compliance with the legislation or or collective labor agreement that you pack the assigning a task to a student and also uh make sure that uh the trainee has the skills to perform the task thank you a financial report of less than 325 000 euros does it have to be certified by external auditors or the f sign signature is enough i think this question seems to be related to this uh certificate on the financial statements because i see this threshold threshold of 325 000 euros so um actually the threshold does not come concerned the financial report perceives the amount of requested contribution for certain costs and then um you have to provide in addition to your to your financial report and your financial statement a certificate on the financial statement which is indeed has to be done by an external auditor thank you again so can you give details on how a paid leave or a sig leaf do not change the productive hours so i see that the question also mentions uh that it would be in the option for productive hours which is the fixed number 1720 hours and here it's uh very simple in terms of productive hours is that you don't deduct any hours for paid leave or sick leave thank you i have another question here two questions that are floating up and down what happens if the personal month rate you gave in the proposal submission differs from the actual pm rate when it comes to do the financial report maybe i can try to go ahead here um okay so from a point of view from another point of view in the financial statement not in the proposal the basic rule is that you should submit at the end the action first so of course you should not submit the personal amount you will submit the number of hours enter the real cost uh calculated the hourly rate so you will not submit an actual pm uh for us in our review if you calculate it through a pm a person a cost of a person month that's uh according to your usual practices but what do you expect is that calculation of the personal cost follows one of the possibilities explained earlier in their presentations either through um actually average and then using productive orders and so on so what we really look at from another perspective is that the actual number of hours and actual hourly rate is correct okay thank you sorry we have a slight problem actually with your sound if you could next time approach the micro a little bit more because sometimes we lose you somehow yes of course next question what does properly dated and sign mean which time frame is accepted for the signature of the timesheet so the timesheet should be signed at least monthly by the person working and the supervisor so the time frame is uh within within the month and here we have a question about one of the presentations what are the specific rules to pay more than the normal salary slide 11 of some of you so this is about the project-based remuneration and if we try to explain it in a nutshell some somebody who identifies that they have a way of remunerating where they have uh remuneration which is specific when the person works on specific activities notably for example for preservation in in certain grants but not only horizon 2020 grants the person will be and the beneficiary will have its remuneration under project-based remuneration and they have to identify if part of their remuneration is called additional remuneration so for this they would have to calculate two rates they would have to calculate a rate for the action and they're they're going to use their personal cost they're paying for this specific activity for which they're paying more uh divided by the hours spent on this activity for which they're paying more and this gives them an action rate and they have to compare it with what they would pay if the person was working on a project funded by a national scheme and there there are several references to see how you calculate this rate for a a project funded by national scheme notably it can arise from a regulatory uh requirements or form internal rules and that there is nothing of these references you can use the average of the remuneration of the person in the in the last year and then you have this uh we call it uh reference reference rate for the national funded projects and then you compare the action rate that you calculated for this specific activity for which you may want to pay more with the rate that you calculated for an uh project funded by a national scheme and if you have if you have more if the action rate is superior is more than the reference rate for national scheme this part is additional remuneration and then this part uh does not enter into the the calculation that we've explained of an hourly rate and the the personal cost by this multiplication it can come on top if the beneficiary is a non-profit entity and in the limit of 8 000 euros per person per year thank you and can you adjust the timesheet if you declare in the wrong word package because you the timesheet you will not provide it with your with your submission of your reports and financial statements this is part of the documents that you must keep notably in case of an audit i'm not sure if serene is a good way to make a correction in a time sheet what i can say is that if so depends also on the type of tension to use if you have a time recording system uh electronic one of course you may have uh it should be registered in the lots and so on and you should have the possibility to do that and document it properly yeah the reasoning why you are changing backwards because i imagine this backwards a time sheet um so this is for the time record for the electronic one for the paper timesheets um of course you can do it if you realize there is an error but to document it properly in a better way or the best practice would be to explain what happens and ensure that the correction is really thank you sorry does the gdpr law have any impact on declaring personal salary is an approval for an employer required uh well i am not sure that i will be able to answer this question we are declaring personal costs in the financial statement it's a global amount uh for the whole personal cost of the beneficiary and then when it comes to uh checks that may be done at the time of an audit then you would the the auditors would see personal data i mean with their in the the payslips etc but they're they're working under strict uh compliance with their uh regulation on data protection and what happens if you end up below the amount of budget meaning cost equal hours per hour rate received from the eu so uh you declare all the costs which are eligible and so if you're the result of your calculation is less than then you had budgeted you declare the real cost so the costs which are really eligible to the work really the time really worked on the action and so the the cost resulting from that which means that you will receive a less than budgeted then if you are in a consortium in a multi-beneficiary grant possibly the remaining budget can be transferred to another beneficiary for instance thank you is it necessary to fill in timesheets for personnel that is employee full time so the only exception to the use of timesheets is not only that the person is employed full time but that it works exclusively on the horizon 2020 action so that's really really the if i may difference here so in terms of evidence um what you should keep in mind is that uh if a person has its own there are two possibilities either use timesheets including for those that work full time or you use the declaration for exclusive work so the answer is yes we should use timesheets even if the person will work full-time or declaration for exclusive thank you thank you and we may add that this use of the declaration on exclusive work of course it's it can it's not an obligation it's a you it's only it's a choice but you can only use it if there's exclusive work and you really have to be careful that the person does not have any other activity and other activities are quickly taken into account to consider that you know we're not working exclusively on the action so the safest way if we are talking this morning about avoiding errors is timesheets thank you both next question can we declare our subsidiaries hours or costs subsidiary personnel is not directly working for us but charging via invoice so here we are in a case where it's uh possibly a third party so if we're talking about another legal entity than the beneficiary it's a another legal entity will be a third party to the model grant agreement and in this respect uh cannot just charge costs and beneficiary cannot just charge costs for uh staff in its uh subsidiary working on the horizon 2020 action so then you have to um consider how the this third party may be involved in the action and um if this charging is done by invoice um well yeah it has to you have to see for example if it could be if it's linked to the beneficiary it may be a linked third party and then when you have this status but you have to do that in the preparation of your proposal and during the grant preparation then an affiliated uh sorry a link third party uh can declare its own cost so then the subject subsidiary will be declaring its own costs and um the only thing that makes me think that's maybe another type of or third party is also that it may be just uh providing staff and in this way um seconded seconding staff to the beneficiary so this could be possibly also uh considered as in-kind contribution of staff to the beneficiary in this case uh this would have to be indicated in the annex one of the grant agreement and this is a condition for the cost to be eligible and then maybe it could be also another type of third party like subcontracting if there is a if the subsidiary is carry out action task but maybe this not the most well fitted option in this case because when you are using subcontracts uh you have to ensure that the subcontract is awarding in a manner ensuring best value for money and usually this is not appropriate for uh entities which are affiliated and they're rather fall as an exception for subcontracts thank you isabel the work of an accounting department who is working actually on calculating personal costs is that considered undirect cost or personal costs so usually administrative staff is and the work that they do is usually considered as falling under indirect costs and it's only if it's the usual accounting practice of the beneficiary to register these uh costs as personal costs and that the cost fulfill the lgbt conditions for personal costs that they could be considered as direct personal costs thank you we have a question now from xavier or xavier we have seconded researchers but we only compensate the giving entity a fraction of their cost how to report this part for free and part against payment so i understand this from from the point of view of beneficiary i would say that as long as there is a sort of financial transaction with the third party which is provided their staff it would fall under uh in kind contribution against payment and then uh you have to declare this this specific cost category for the secondary staff under article 62 a3 and you have to make sure that your income contribution is indicated in the next one of the grant agreement perfect thank you very much how does a partner report personal costs from a third party major established company in this case providing co-funding so here we re a partner report personal cost from a third party so um when really talking here about third parties depends absolutely on what type of third party and what is this third party doing if this third party is um actually working on doing an action task describing an x1 it should be either a link third party or a subcontractor and fulfilling the conditions the if the third party is not doing itself an action task but only providing staff to the uh one of the beneficiaries it can be in kind contribution and so may possibly uh second its staff um the only doubt that i have a question is that the third party is providing co-funding um i'm not sure how this intervenes there but from the point of your personal costs you would have to see really if the third party is uh working on the action or only providing uh staff and in any case just the main thing to remember is you cannot just assume that a beneficiary can declare costs for a third party this is never the case they have to make sure that the third party is uh involved in the proper manner if it's contributing staff then this has to be provided in an x1 if it's a linked third party it should be in the grant agreement from the beginning if it's a subcontract there should be subcontracting costs foreseen in the budget and in short compliance with the conditions for subcontracting thank you we have another question from anonymous are there any requirements for reporting of personal costs of third parties providing in-kind contribution against payment article 11 and who contributes staff so yeah or i don't know if sorry you want to um i can give it a try thank you isabel so probably the question refers to any other requirements in addition to those uh first thing in article 11 you can understand well for requirements for reporting um to my knowledge there are no other additional requirements for reporting personal [Music] unless for those that do not work on the premises of the beneficiary this may be indeed a specificity thank you somebody is confused here about the hours work doesn't the time allocation correspond to hours really work on the project so when we say that you cannot use allocated time we mean that you cannot use a percentage of the of time because this is a sort of an assumption that a person is going to work a certain percentage and that's what we why we ask for the real number of hours worked on the project so that cannot be a percentage thank you and we have a question from anna monchirovic is an external financial audit of the project necessary for the beneficiary and partners should it be included in the budget understand that this question is referring again to the submission of a certificate on the financial statement if you fall under this requirement that means that you as a beneficiary has uh requested above uh 300 and 200 325 000 euros for certain costs um and then indeed to do the cfs you need to use an external financial auditor and uh the costs to have the this cfs done can be uh eligible under the category of other costs for contracts and this can be because this cost can be reported in the final reports thank you and here we have a lucky person who has two projects one horizon 2020 one horizon europe can they use the same timesheet for a person working in both projects so under horizon 2020 you have these minimum requirements that your time recording system must fulfill under horizon europe if you opt for using your time recording system they also have to be reliable so presumably if they fulfill the conditions and the horizon 2020 they will be considered as reliable timesheets under your horizon europe i don't know if sohin you have other views on that no i think uh that's very useful and maybe also to mention that the horizon 2020 timesheets will be hours your as in europe would be expected to be in days but you can also use hours as well and then convert them in days so thank you thank you both and here are questions related to the pandemic many employees work from home at this time without a real registration of the working hours how can we declare that work from home um so um during the pandemic indeed uh there were situations where people had to work from home whereas there was no uh usual practice of having telework and that was something that we accepted exceptionally that even if it was not a usual practice telework would be accepted um you still need to register the hours in some manner and we also made an easier possibility for the signature during the this uh kovit pandemic uh situations for the signature of the time sheets where if they could not be signed monthly because people could not uh physically or then they didn't have to find the the timesheet they didn't have any electronic system in place uh either the signature could be postponed to the moment where would be possible or there would be a system where you would could um by exchange of emails register and confirm the number of hours worked [Music] thank you very much which kind of document an sme owner without a salary should provide to show evidence of the number of days worked on an action i can try to reply to this one so the same documentation that is for any employee meaning time sheets or declaration of exclusive work it's probably timesheets in the case of some number okay thank you what are the consequences in case errors are identified by eu for a beneficiary for example during an audit or a definition of the project is there any penalty uh yes just before answering this i'm just going to point you to the fact that if you have questions related to kovi there were um quite a few questions and answers on coving situations that were published on the portal and maybe i don't know if it would be possible for instance to add the link to these questions and answers in their in the page of the event because that still can still be usually there there is a link to specific faqs about the kovind 90s super very good and then about the cases when you have areas identified during an audit then the audit is going to make the findings uh that costs are ineligible and that the costs are should be rejected and then the audit will be transferred to the uni to their service in charge of the grant who will see how to implement the audit and this implementation of the audit can lead to a recovery of the cost so then that means that the beneficiary receives a debit note and uh well pre-information letter in which we explain that their cost to be recovered with an opportunity to provide comments during a contradictory procedure and then depend if there are no arguments that we can take into consideration uh to prevent the recovery then it's a debit note and we recover the money thank you isabel there is another question i think it's also for you what do you mean you cannot declare time allocation percentage of the time of the person what if a person is not fully working actually so uh i think there are two different things here in any case the main case is that you use timesheets and when you use timesheets we want to see a number of hours you cannot use a percentage to declare the time that the person really worked on the action you need to report a number of hours and the number of hours has to be reported in the timesheet then the different situation and the exception to the to the use of timesheets where you put a number of hours is that if the person is working exclusively on the action instead of fulfilling filling timesheets it can just uh the poll investor can just sign a declaration saying that this person worked for this number of months exclusively on the action and i see that surin has raised his hand thank you indeed i would add here that in practice what does it mean not to use time allocation is that when we are doing a financial audit we are really expecting to have a time sheet in which you will declare the number of hours to work on the action if you have a percentage for example 50 our expectation is that okay this 50 percent is really represented represents the reality in order to show that you can do it for timesheet um why because percentages could also be used for budgeting purposes estimations and so on so we do expect for the cost is to be actual and incurred and it's for the personal cost but also for the number of hours used for the project because this is an important element to complete the personal cost so the the allocation as such is uh used yes in the financial management in general in companies but it cannot be considered as such at least from our uh horizon 2020 as being equivalent potential thank you thank you serene at the end of the reporting period we realized that the hourly cost rate exposed was wrong how can we correct and when can we correct this mistake and the project has not ended yet so when there is uh really an error in the in the calculation of the personal costs and you have declared declared uh the personal cost with an error you can at the next reporting period make an adjustment where you will declare the right costs for the previous reporting period however i just want to draw to your attention that you cannot modify the calculation of your costs notably when you've used the last closed financial year you cannot the next year think oh and now i have the full figures so i i would do i would calculate my cost differently no what was declared under the last close financial year must not be touched and they must remain declared as they were and it's only if you really made a mistake like uh making declaring a salary that was too high or something like that that you can make use this adjustment possibility to make the correction thank you and in the next question we have the case of somebody who's working less than the 17-20 hours but they use the 1720 to calculate the hourly rate what is the impact of that for a time sheet should we oblige researchers to work up to 17-20 hours so this number was fixed across the board taking in situation variations uh across europe and so it is indeed the only fixed number and then you considering you have to use it if you want to use this option productive hours then you cannot modify it and uh still you only can only declare in a number of hours worked in the action the real action real hours worked so that you cannot change and if um this is uh problematic for you this is indeed one of the situations why we have created other options for the productive hours and maybe you can look into the two other options like the individual or standard productive hours and so please yes thank you just to compliment that we should in practice we should put separately the number of collective hours used to calculate the number of hours and the number of hours worked um of course the the number of hours worked can go until the number of start productive hours in this case 1720 if they go above what is the so-called level but the true notions are not exactly in practice you should pay attention to the definition to the terminology thank you thank you both appeal api is signing timesheets as supervisor of all persons in the action and validating also his hair timesheets as own supervisor is it okay or does it need a validation from a higher level if the pi in his organization has a supervisor independently from i mean the action that we are talking about but if the pi has a supervisor then the timesheet should be signed by the supervisor thank you do we take into account the bonuses that an employee may take at the end of the year based on the assessment procedures of the company i'm not exactly sure what this is referring to so the bonuses that you have at the end of the year if you are uh calculating your hourly rate per year you will uh put this bonus in the year where the the bonus was accrued in the accounts and if you are making your calculation of the hourly rate per month then you have to be careful that presumably the bonus was generated over a longer period than a month and then you can only put in their personal cost of each month the part that corresponds to the entitlement generated during one month that's why also we say that this way of using you calculating the hourly rate per month is slightly more complex thank you and is it possible to include in the hourly rate calculation the overtime work by a person in the previous year or increase payments for work in nights or weekends so um when once you have calculated your hourly rate for a full financial year you don't come back on it unless there was a mistake and if you had to use for for the first month of a reporting period the figures of the last close financial year you do also don't come back on them when you come to the end of the of the ongoing financial year apart having said that over time is included in in certain in the certain options to to for the productive hours so when if you have the option of uh fixed number 1720 hours this figure this number does not change so in a way over time is included but you cannot add anything to it if you are using the option of individual annual productive hours overtime is something that you must add to the workable hours and if you are using using the standard annual productive hours it depends on your uh usual account practice for for the for the productive hours to add over time and how to how you add it thank you and the next question is it possible well they have moving is it possible to calculate cost center age rates our rates are imaging maybe we can i can reply to this one in practice yes it is so it's the support calculation of average personal cost practice is to calculate one hourly rate per course entire department category of staff and so on so yes thank you very much and we have here a question from a colleague an officer from dg connect at the european commission mateo maskani just for information we have invited not only external people coordinators project participants national contact points to participate but also people internally from the commission if they are interested so matteo is asking about the cf tests in case of partial takeover from one legal entity to several illegal entities and in the case of the 325 000 euro cumulative threshold is rich but i was wondering if the cfs needs to be provided by the legal entity taking over or they have to ask the cfs also to the taken over legal entities so this is typically the type of case where we need full information because it's a case-by-case analysis of which partial takeover we are talking about and which are the new legal entities which are taking over the previous one so we would need to have the the full information that he could provide us internally so you know mateo you can contact internally people is additional remuneration bonuses for smes personnel allowed what about the overtime against payment [Music] so for sme i understand you're talking about if it's sme personnel uh it's the rules apply like any other personal costs uh if you're talking about the owner of the sme if the owner is receiving a salary again it's the same rules than as for other personal costs so um if there is a additional remuneration if we're on a project base we have to see if they profit the eligibility that we have explained and also in the questions but if the sme owner is not receiving a salary then it has to use the unit cost and the unit cost is a fixed amount well it's a fixed amount with the country coefficient correction but the amount cannot be changed actually automatically applied during the reporting and you don't change anything to to the amount thank you and then just so i'll just add the fact that the question refers to additional innovation as well probably just the understanding of the oriented to the provisions additional generation may also refer only to non-profit uh identities thank you very much sorry for interrupting you can i change in personal the cost of a consultant that i want to involve in the project but the contract is before the project starting date so the fact that the consultant is already working with the beneficiary before the project is not an issue um then if you want to charge it under personal cost that's one not one of the things that you you have to check you will have to check the conditions under the article 6282 and notably uh that the contract is directly between the consultant and the beneficiary and that the consultant is working in the condition similar to those of an employee and that the the consultant does not resolve uh own the results and um the remuneration of the consultant is uh similar to those of an employee but the the fact that it starts before for me is not not an issue thank you and we have another question next question from janine why is there a difference between consultants natural person company and natural person consult us in film company so if you want the personal cost of a consultant which has a one-person company let's say to fall under personal costs you have to ensure that the the contract is between the natural person and the beneficiary if the contract is with the one person company of the consultants then it cannot fall under their personal costs for a direct contract between a natural person and the beneficiaries thank you just to let you know that we have a little bit less than 50 minutes to go now and we still have quite a lot of questions so we are trying to go fast with those a professor works in the end in the projects under separate contracts in the university can he or she use an hourly rate different than regular rate from the teaching contract so i think this is typically a case that should be considered uh under the perspective of uh project-based remuneration you have to see if it fulfills the condition that is the type of project-based remuneration where um there is a perhaps a different contract for certain activities different for example than teaching so maybe the professor has a certain hourly rate for teaching and a different contract for other activities and then as i explained earlier and i don't think we should go through the whole thing again you have to check if uh with this calculation of two rates and comparing them if there is additional remuneration and then if the university is a non-profit entity and there is additional remuneration it may be added on the top of the uh calculation of the the personal cost and in the limit of 8 000 euros per person per clear thank you and a question about whether it's possible to combine annual and monthly hourly rates for a project ending in 2022 if we use the 2021 annual rates we cannot include the 2022 salaries increase so um indeed the the fact that the last close financial if you are using a yearly hourly rates calculated once per year and when you are in this situation where you don't have the the numbers for the ongoing financial year and you use the last close financial year indeed you cannot take into consideration a salary increase that would happen in the first year of the ongoing financial year and that's why we offer the possibility to use monthly hourly rates however you can you have to use the same option during a full financial year so you cannot switch in the middle of the financial year and then you can switch at the beginning of the next financial year okay thank you and the next question is from ruben is it possible to introduce only hours to a task with no economic value well from the perspective of reporting personal costs you would only need to report the work done on the under the action and we don't uh associate an economic value to to this the only economic value in the sense is that you you need to when you you have the number of hours you're going to multiply it by an hourly rate where the personal costs are are taken in consideration but for uh reporting personal costs i don't see really the impact of the economic value if i may add i'm not sure the question maybe it could be specified later or because it's not very clear what exactly does it mean from an into perspective for this important requirement for a number of hours from an output perspective in the grant agreement during the implementation regarding the economic value that's starting to something else which is not tackled here in this presentation so this would be clarified thank you very much thank you sarin thank you isabel should the rate should the date sorry on time she'd be within the two weeks of the following month or within the same month as the time sheet if i may i think this was already replied by isabel it's on a monthly basis if it's the date of the approval and signature okay thank you if a project starts on day two of a month can the month be counted as full if day one is a sunday we had already this question before somebody wants to add something else i would just add the and then the fact that of course in practice we see this in all this also of course if there is a sunday or a saturday and so on but we are looking at this of course the workable days uh except uh situations where there could be work during weekends as well laboratories and so on but this doesn't really have an impact i mean it may only have an impact if there's a sunday or saturday is a working day if not there shouldn't be an impact on the time sheet the thai normally mirrors the really the month and hours work during the months of course if the person and the technician for example in the laboratory has to work on such a day then you will put six hours in the saturday okay great thank you very much is the cfs mandatory for projects with budget reach 325 000 or do the 325 rule only apply to the direct costs for the direct costs so the cfs uh becomes mandatory when uh it's not the budget exactly it's whether what you request as eu contribution and reimbursement and then the categories which are concerned when you calculate this uh threshold of 325 000 euros is that the amount of uh actual cost and unit cost calculated uh based on the accounting practices of the beneficiary so that's the actual cost as well as the average personal costs and the inter cost for inter internally invoiced goods and services so you put together all the reimbursement that you've asked for the actual costs and uh these uh unit costs based on usual cost accounting practices and if the eu contribution requested for these uh costs this pool of costs is above 325 000 euros then you have to provide the cfs and you have to provide it at the end in the final report thank you and here a natural person consultant need to charge that but the university cannot recover the taxes so it would look like the cost is higher than other employees is that okay maybe you can try to reply to this one um so the cost for a natural person um if it's a direct person or natural person there shouldn't be any deity in the cost or the cost declared at least it shouldn't it should be declared without me i'm like it's a big one no okay thank you very much do personal costs have to be associated with a cost center or a a last degree account specific for that project so i don't know when you are checking their the way their costs are registered in the accounts is that something that you you go to that to that detail i think this may be linked to the fact that um when we are auditing an action we do try to make the link between the cost declared and the accounting books these in many beneficiaries they use project based they call it project accounting meaning that they can link cost to a specific project beneficiaries are doing that of course for the traceability of the cost um obviously when we have to deal with costs like sap or other type of uh system operating system it tool that that is using software sorry that is used to to calculate the project cost um we usually go to of course to link this cost the current project to the general um accounting so we do we do make a link here during an audit okay thank you very much can we declare only a part of ours recorded in the timesheets [Music] um well we advise that you declare all the hours worked on the project and you that you declare also all the eligible costs um but of course there's no problem from from our side if you if you declare less than than what you've worked thank you can you give an example for reimbursement and i guess this is a very large question so you're going to you can calculate your personal cost according to the formulas that we have explained and then you will uh put the result the resulting costs in the financial statements that you need to report at the end of a reporting period and then following the submission of this financial statement the commission will analyze your cost claim and the cost and make a payment in accordance well for the eligible costs and the payment will be made to the coordinator of the of the action at the view of your consortium and then the coordinator distributes the payment without unjustified delays to the beneficiaries without within the consortium i hope this answers thank you very much is it possible to sign the timesheet by person annually instead of monthly but with the detail by month so the quick answer is no the frequency of the signature must be at least monthly thank you and how do you declare a direct cost for a subcontract for example train tickets for a subcontract subcontract to attend an activity inherent to horizon 2020 so here i understand it's not obvious because we use words in a certain manner but here the example of a train ticket would not be a subcontract what we call a subcontract on the horizon 2020 is when you outsource the performance of an action task and a task which is described in the annex one of your grant agreement to a third party now in the case here where a employee needs to take a train ticket i understand for example to go to a conference which is part of and this this activity is part of the task of the of the grant of the reaction then this could fall under travel costs and travel costs are different from personal costs that have their own eligibility conditions which are mainly that the cost must be in line with the usual practice of the beneficiary to uh to declare uh travel costs to to uh have personal costs in their accounts and to allow the the way the people travel for example if it's uh if they're in their usual policy it's a only second class where you can't put first class for for the travel under the under the horizontal action and also the cost per trouble must fulfill like any other cost the general eligibility conditions these are actually something quite useful to know about them they're an article six one of your grant agreement and amongst these general lgbt conditions you have the fact that the cost is really incurred by the beneficiary during the duration of the action and also that the cost must be necessary so it's really necessary for the implementation of the action and also there has to be reasonable and in line with the principles of the economy are and efficiency thank you very much we are entering the last minute already so let's go with the next question is it possible to allocate personal internship funded by federer to horizon 2020 projects if not is it possible to associate their hours to tasks [Music] so the fact of working an association that's something that's not related to cost but when it comes to the declaration of costs if the their internship is already funded uh by eu funds you have to be very careful that you cannot do double funding which means uh declaring cost twice for the same item thank you what happens when the status of an employee is changing for instance stops working as an employee and becomes a consultant so if the status of an employee is changing um since the lgbt rules could change as well for example from employee to consultant there might be different algebraic events practice what we see during audits also is that there are two separate algorithms thank you very much actually we have reached now known what about the staying five more minutes what do you think sorry what do you think isabel i'm answering a few more questions is that okay with you yes sure yes okay just five minutes then a few more questions would it be acceptable to keep the same hourly rate for the whole duration of a project if the salary remains approximately the same during the years of the project the hourly rate has to be calculated per full financial year so every year you need to especially well if you're doing the calculation per year but it has to be yearly or monthly but it cannot be a longer period than that and then you have to use their personal costs which are recorded in your accounts for that year so uh you cannot simply use the hourly rate for example say 2017 you have to recalculate it for the financial year during which there was the the personal costs were incurred thank you and how can you refund a cost of materials spent by subcontractors for example the subcontractor buys a device used for our work package well uh if we so now we're really talking about a subcontract in the way we understand it on the horizon 2020 when an action task is outsourced to our third party which is a subcontractor uh though in the case of subcontract the beneficiary pays a price to the subcontractor and the price includes uh everything so it should cover uh all the costs of the subcontractor and including actually a profit margin and i this is why we have specific conditions for subcontractors that must be awarded in a manner ensuring best value for money just in this question i would advise that you have to be careful that you're not really doing uh cascading funding and it's really the subcontractor that is um identified as the third party which is carrying out the action task and it's which is not passing on the task to another uh subcontractor down the line thank you how do you calculate the annual productive hours of a part-time contract by proportionality yes absolutely notably for example if we use this fixed number of annual productive hours which is 1720 if the person is working part time you will use half of this number as your uh denominator for the calculation of your hourly rate thank you and here we have a coca-cola in italy that is based on delivering specific outputs these conflicts with the payment that must be based on work time how can we solve this conflict so for those who don't know the coca-cola in italy is one of these contracts which are not employment contracts and they are in this bigger in other category of a quasi-subordinate work contract so for this type of contract you have for each contract on a case by case basis you have to check whether they fulfill the conditions of the article 6282 of or for personal costs in the case of a direct contract between a natural person and the beneficiary and one of these conditions is actually that the remuneration must be similar to those of an employee and it must be the remuneration must be based on working time and not on debilitary delivering specific outputs so in the case of these questions it looks as if this cucu is not something that could fall in the case of personal costs and then if it's not personal cost you have to check if it's maybe a contract under article 10 of the grant agreement and where the the main conditions for the eligibility of cost under contracts is that the contract was awarded in a manner ensuring best value for money and without conflict of interest thank you and i think we are going now for the last question does a maximum time duration apply for a line manager to sign a timesheet of an employee should it be done monthly quarterly annually so it's always the same frequency it's at least monthly okay thank you very much we have many more questions but i don't think we'll have time to go through all of them actually you should know that all these questions are tabulated are analyzed and they eventually feed the frequent ask questions table that we have published in the funding intenders portal so they are not lost i want to remind you that presentations are available on the webpage at the very top you have the agenda presentation both presentations from isabel and soaring and you have links to different documents including the annotated model grant agreement specific fi queues about the covet etc the recording will be available immediately after this session in the same page so you can always watch again part of all or the the seminar we want really to thank you for your participation and hope you can join us for the next one we are publishing from time to time webinars and actually we are having a new one on dissemination and exploitation next five of october but that will be for horizon europe all these webinars are published in the funding and vendors portal under the news section so if you go to news you see there the information about the different webinars we publish and whether you need to register agenda all the information is there so you are welcome to participate anytime thank you very much for your participation and we wish you a very nice day and of course sorry i want to thank olivier margan emmanuel crowling for the technical help and of course isabella hua and sarin servant for for their their availability to to answer all the questions and to do the presentations thank you all have a very nice day bye okay bye [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: EU Science & Innovation

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Id: rRkZ10VkpHo

Length: 126min 49sec (7609 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021