Part V - TRAC fEC

Section F: Post-award

Verifying costs

19. The costs estimated on projects should be verified, to ensure that they were actually incurred.
20. Verification can be done by either:
    • recording actual costs as incurred; or
    • recording costs on estimate, and then matching these with the original rate calculations.
21. Unless otherwise specified below, the required records should be kept at project level on systems that (a) provide an audit trail; and (b) allow aggregation of the entries in each field (time or cost category) each year. The total cost should be recorded in all cases (not any lesser total that forms the price for a particular sponsor).
22. Directly incurred costs, such as RAs, dedicated technicians and other staff, consumables, travel and subsistence, and purchases of equipment for a project, should be recorded as expenditure is made, according to current practice.
23. Directly allocated costs, such as pool/shared technicians, major research facilities, and estates, should be charged against the project, on a periodic basis (at least annually) according to estimated usage (by way of regular recharge journal or similar). The original records of estimated usage for Research, and calculation of the rates being applied, should be available for audit on an appropriate project file (but this could be paper- or electronic-based).
24. The costs of PIs, fellows and co-investigators, as originally estimated and finalised during the project application process, should be recorded against the project periodically, not less than once a year. Again, appropriate records of the time originally estimated, and the pay bandings applied, should be available for audit on an appropriate project file (but the time estimated need not be in a form that could be aggregated for all projects, although this would be good practice).
25. Indirect costs should be periodically recorded on initial estimate, not less than once a year. Appropriate records of the time and rates used to calculate the indirect cost totals should be kept for audit, but this could be a paper- or electronic-based file.
26. Each year, or as required for project management purposes, the Principal Investigator should be able to confirm (or otherwise) that, broadly, the amount of time estimated at the start of the project is likely to have been spent, and will be spent, by the staff on the project. Broadly, in this context, means cumulative over the project so far, with reasonable assumptions as to future work on the project, and plus or minus 20%.
27. The PI should be in a position to confirm this; the institution or head of department need not take responsibility, unless the institution so wishes. The PI need not keep formal records – but sponsors’ ‘dipstick’ style visits might need to see some evidence of time spent, e.g. paper-based diary entries, records of meetings, volume/quality of outputs, laboratory notes, conflicts of time flagged with head of department or supervisor, and so on. This does not imply the need for any timesheets, but it would be good practice in project management to keep a simple record (e.g. in a desk diary) of the significant inputs made to the project. The events, rather than time, are all that might be recorded in this. See Annex 1 – Research Council website – for more information on Research Council dipstick testing.
28. The records therefore required under TRAC are no more than the desk diaries, laboratory notebooks and other mechanisms that staff already use to manage their time and their projects.
29. Timesheets or other records of actual academic staff time by project should not be maintained to meet TRAC requirements. They are not required under TRAC. However, if a research unit does decide to complete partial or full timesheets (perhaps to satisfy EU or commercial requirements; or to overcome problems of robustness if there is little Research activity), then institutions should ensure that those processes, including the definitions of hours and costs/hour, are broadly compatible with the processes institutions are introducing more widely, both for project costing under TRAC and for the annual TRAC cost allocation exercise.
30. Exceptionally, the Research Councils may require special project management procedures on very large projects, as currently (e.g. ESRC centres). This might continue to involve a particular type of time-recording (such as timesheets).
31. Every year, from 2009, the institutions should compare the total academic costs attributed to the Research Council sponsor group in the annual TRAC time allocation exercise, with the total academic staff costs charged to Research Council projects in the accounting records - see reconciliation.