How do we calculate costs?

For full details on cost reporting you must consult the Grant Agreement or ask for help. For calculating the cost seek help by the research support team in your organisation. You must also need to involve accounting or financial administration in your unit to get it all info correct

The basics are:

• You can only claim costs for work or other expenses within the dates of the reporting period
• You must document your work with timesheets (if you do not work 100% on one project)
• All costs claimed must be documented in the accounts of your project i.e. there must be an invoice or receipt somewhere in the system (you do not need to find them)
• All costs must be directly related to implementing the project

The cost you claim:

• Work
• Travel and accommodation
• Consumables
• Equipment and infrastructure. This may be complicated because it involves:
  • Depreciation costs and rules
  • % usage by the project
  • Expected/normal lifetime of equipment (that may be much longer than the project)
• Unit prices for clinical trials (optional) SEE xx

In many cases, you will drop costs for infrastructure as the effort and rules for claiming it is too complicated.

Principals for calculating costs of work:

• Yearly salary in NOK including social cost (e.g. pension, insurance and “arbeidsgiveravgift”)
• Divided by 1650 hours (that is a full work year) = hourly rate
• Hourly rate multiplied by hours recorded in the timesheets = work costs
• Work costs in NOK translated into EUR

Travel, accommodation and consumables cost are together called Other Costs.

• You just pic the cost from the project accounts sum up and translate into EUR

All costs in the accounts are in NOK even if they originally may have been in EUR (e.g. travel or hotel costs). You take the NOK cost in the accounts and translate this into EUR. The original EUR cost is not used.

For organisations that do not get a VAT refund, VAT is now an eligible cost in H2020.

The EUR rate is calculated as the average rate over the Reporting Period. The correct place to find the rate is here: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/exchange/eurofxref/html/eurofxref-graph-nok.en.html at the European Central Bank.

 

Remember:

The way you calculate and document costs are:

“According to your normal accounting practice.”

This means that according to your normal practice you:

• keep originals or scan them
• decide on yearly number of working hours (within the GA limits)
• use depreciation rules
• document your cost i.e. how you extract cost from the accounting system
• handle sick leaves, number of holidays, persons that do not work full time etc. etc