Claiming Staff Time From a Funder

Funded work — research grants, innovation programmes, regional development, defence and public contracts — reimburses staff cost against recorded time, and the standard applied is the strictest any timesheet record will face.

The practical lesson in “Claiming Staff Time From a Funder” is that a timesheet only becomes reliable through a process people can operate consistently. For teams exploring tips to increase productivity, tips to increase productivity can add time and project context, provided collection is proportionate, access is limited and every consequential inference receives human review.

It is also the standard most organisations are least prepared for, because the process was designed around payroll and inherits payroll's tolerances.

For a separate benchmark relevant to “Claiming Staff Time From a Funder”, consult the GAO Government Auditing Standards. Use it to test record quality, approvals, retention, employee rights and exception handling against the real workflow rather than treating a software report as self-explanatory evidence.

The four tests

Contemporaneous. Records made at or near the time of the work. Tested against creation dates where the system holds them and against the pattern where it does not. A month of entries created on the last day of the month fails.

Attributable. The hours are allocated to the funded activity specifically, not to a department or a theme. Blanket percentages fail unless supported by a documented methodology that was applied prospectively.

Approved by somebody with knowledge. Self-approval by the principal investigator is the single most common finding, and the one most often defended on the grounds that nobody else knows the work — which is precisely the auditor's point.

Complete. The person's whole time is accounted for, not just the funded part. A claim of 60% to a project is unsupportable without knowing what the other 40% was, because the percentage is only meaningful against a total.

The percentage trap

Many claims are built on an agreed percentage of a person's time. This is permitted under most schemes with a methodology, and it is where organisations most often go wrong.

The permitted version: a documented basis, set in advance, reviewed periodically, with actual time recorded and reconciled against it. The unpermitted version: a number agreed at bid stage, applied unchanged for three years, with no record behind it. The second looks identical in the claim and fails entirely on examination.

What a defensible record looks like

Entries created within days of the work. Allocation to the work package, not to the project in general. A narrative that relates to the work package's stated activities. Approval by somebody other than the claimant. The person's full time accounted for across all codes. And retention for the period the grant conditions require, which is commonly several years after the project ends.

None of this is difficult. All of it has to be true at the time, because none of it can be created afterwards.

The consequences of failure

Disallowance of the sampled items, extrapolated across the claim. Repayment, sometimes with interest. In repeated or serious cases, exclusion from future funding, and in the most serious, referral.

The reputational element falls on named individuals, which is worth saying to a principal investigator who regards the paperwork as somebody else's problem. The PI's name is on the claim.

Running your own audit

Pick twenty claimed weeks at random from the current project. For each: when was each entry created relative to the work date; does the allocation point at a work package; is there a narrative that relates to it; who approved it and were they independent; and does the person's total time for that week add up.

Score it honestly. The result is what an auditor would find, two years early, and the twenty weeks take a day. Organisations that do this annually have a materially different experience of audit from those that do not.

Before the next bid

Two questions to settle before committing to a time-based claim. Can the system produce, for any week, a record that passes the four tests. And is there somebody other than the claimant who can approve.

If either answer is no, fix it during mobilisation rather than at the first claim. Retrofitting contemporaneity is the one thing that cannot be done, and a project that runs for two years on reconstructed records has a problem with no remedy available at the end of it.

Partners and subcontractors in the same claim

Where a project is delivered by a consortium, the lead organisation submits a claim containing other organisations' staff time and is usually accountable for all of it, including records it does not hold and cannot inspect.

This should be settled in the collaboration agreement rather than at the first claim: what standard partners must meet, what evidence they provide, who may approve their hours, and what happens if a partner's records fail. Lead organisations routinely discover at audit that a partner has been claiming against a monthly percentage with no underlying records, and the disallowance lands on the lead.