The Joint Research Office offers a comprehensive range of financial services to researchers in the Trust and the School. This page contains guidance on how the Joint Research Office can help you set up an account, ensure expenditure against your account is dealt with efficiently, provide you with budget information and close down completed grants.
If you have a problem with a study budget, statement, account inquiry or wish to discuss an amendment to the present contract please contact the Joint Research Office. Our finance staff may be able to offer advice, if not solve the problem for you.
Once the Joint Research Office has received your grant approval letter or, in the case of clinical trials, the final signed clinical trials agreement, the Finance team will set up a budget code for each area of expenditure. This expenditure can be in the form of staff, equipment, consumables or Trust service costs and, in the case of clinical trials, is often all of these.
The actual setting up process generally takes around 48 hours and the Office will inform you of the relevant codes and budget headings (known as the announcement) once this process is complete.
The Joint Research Office team will invoice your project’s funder on a periodic basis, as agreed in the grant letter of approval or clinical trials agreement.
Directly-employed staff
If your project has a member of staff directly charged to its budget, then that member of staff will be paid from the medical or nursing budget lines. It must be noted that your allotted budget will cover the basic salary only. On no account must the staff member in question be paid overtime or unsocial hours without the prior agreement of the Joint Research Office.
Purchasing equipment and consumables
Medical School purchases should be made by the Investigator through normal Institute purchasing channels. For the Trust, all equipment and consumables must be purchased via the non-stock requisition order book and through the supplies department (see Expenses Claims below). Both Medical School and Trust purchases must use the relevant budget code from the announcement sent to you by the Joint Research Office.
Service costs
All service costs for projects will be journalled, not as tests performed, but as pro-rata to income on the project, i.e. if CT scans are 10% of the budgeted project cost then 10% of the total project income will be journalled to imaging.
Patient payments
It is likely that patient payments will have been costed when the contract was negotiated for a project. Please refer to your copy of the clinical trials agreement to see how these costs will be recovered. Either the project will have a separate budget set up for these re-imbursements (see the announcement) or alternatively the company may re-imburse all travel cost on receipt of an invoice, with attached travel receipts.
Expenses
Claiming money back through payroll should be avoided if at all possible. In many circumstances the Trust will not re-imburse staff for the purchases of equipment, consumables or food. Re-imbursement will be made, however, for travel, conference fees and training courses on the basis that there are receipts attached and that a budget is available to pay for these costs.
Budget holder responsibilities
Ultimately, although the Joint Research Office is responsible for budget administration, it is the Investigator who is the Budget Holder for a project. From the initial announcement that is sent out, it is clear how much is available to spend and what it can be spent on. It is the Investigator’s responsibility to ensure that they do not run over budget. In addition, the Investigator must ensure the Joint Research Office is kept up to date on clinical trial recruitment figures, so that the Office is able to invoice the funder at the correct times, with accurate information.
The Joint Research Office will provide the Investigator with regular (quarterly) statements of account relating to projects, although if you wish to receive them at other intervals please feel free to ask.
Project conclusion
Researchers need to ensure that the Joint Research Office is informed once a project has finished. Please be aware that staff may still have some financial milestones to meet before our files can be closed. Once all of the relevant staff, equipment, consumables or Trust service costs have been paid from the project any residual money, will be journalled to an individual Investigator account or Departmental Investigator account, to be used to train and facilitate future research within your department.
Grant application process
Account management (BLT)