Dashboards in Power BI (reporting tool) that give information about your “P code” research grants to help you manage them financially. Figures are refreshed daily. Key high-level information provided includes:

• Budget – total funding awarded
• Expenditure – what has been spent so far
• Commitments – what you have arranged to spend but haven’t yet spent
• Balance – what is still available, i.e. Budget minus Expenditure and minus Commitments

Graphics and colour-coding are used to try and highlight primarily where projects appear under-spent. These funds must be spent otherwise any underspend must be returned to the funder.

Detail is also available regarding which staff that have been charged to which projects, individual purchases and the details of upcoming commitments.

Terminology explained

Activity Codes

An activity code is effectively an account for spending against. The letter the code begins with denotes what sort of activity that money can be used for.

P codes

A P activity code is the classification given to a £15K+ externally-funded research grant or contract with a defined scope and conditions – effectively a “proper research grant”.

P codes have a unique reference starting with “P” e.g. PA1234_ABCD.  The part before the underscore is generated in Worktribe at application stage.

Projects and Subprojects

A single research award can be split into multiple projects.  Where this is the case, there is a lead project and any number of subprojects. The subproject reference number begins “PS” e.g PSA123_WXYZ.

In the Research Spend Reports, if you are the PI of an award with subprojects, you can see ALL associated subprojects.  If you are an investigator on a subproject, you see only that project.

The letters after the underscore denote the “cost centre” and describe where the activity takes place:
Medicine begins W > Brain Sciences begins WB > Neuroscience is WBNN.

Analysis codes

“Analysis codes” describe the thing the money has been spent on.  This is a hierarchy so you can understand quite a lot from a code, e.g. 

• 16XXXX is all non-staff costs.
• 164XXX is all consumables.
• 164107 is chemicals

Commitments

A Commitment is when you have arranged to pay for something on a research project, but the expenditure has not yet happened.

Commitments can be on staff too - when staff are added to a project, a start and end date for that person is given, which is used to estimate their future cost to the project.  No commitments are generated on students unfortunately.