Transition from net to gross budgeting: Practical consequences

Practical consequences of the transition 2024–2025 will be:

• two invoice deadlines in December, and;
• a wish not to receive invoices between 9 December 2024 and 1 January 2025.

Invoices that do not meet the December deadlines will be paid out as soon as possible in January 2025. Budgeted grants for 2024 for the projects that have not been disbursed in 2024 will be carried over to 2025.

We ask everyone to check if you have outstanding tasks on My RCN web and complete these.

Deadlines for payment requests/invoices December 2024

If you have a project that receives payment by invoice, and want payment in 2024, you must submit the invoice well in advance of the deadline and be careful to check that the invoice is correct. We have two deadlines:

• We must receive invoices by 2 December for qualification projects, event support, infrastructure and others that have non-automatic payment with EHF invoices. All of these have manual processing. It is important to read the terms of the contract for what should be specified in the invoice attachment.
• We must receive invoices by 9 December for researcher projects, KSP, IPN, public/industrial PhD and other projects that are paid against an invoice with an order number (MET), which have machine processing. It is important to check that there is the correct order number on the invoice and that the specification is attached.

Set 0 days due to get the invoice paid in 2024. Invoices with a due date that is after 13 December will be paid in January.

We encourage grant recipients not to invoice more in 2024 than they normally would. If you have planned to invoice in arrears in January 2025 of costs incurred in 2024, we ask you to follow that plan.

Payments in December 2024

The last payment from the account from the Research Council of Norway will take place on 13 December. Payouts can be expected within four banking days after 13 December.

This will apply:

• received and approved invoices/payment requests
• projects with "automatic payment" that are not required to submit a project accounting report. Disbursement will, as usual, come as a single disbursement and with attachments showing the distribution of disbursement per project.

We cannot guarantee payment by 13 December for projects that end this autumn and that must submit a final report/project accounting report.

Requirements for invoices and attachments

For all payment requests/invoices, we only pay grants against project costs that are accounted for in the grant recipient's accounting system. The project accounts must be part of the accounting system or refer to accounted costs in the system.

If salary costs for December are to be included in the invoice, salary costs for the month must be accounted for, but not necessarily paid. For projects that keep timesheets for employees and normally invoice in arrears for the month, we ask that they continue this practice.

Incoming invoices covered by the project must be posted in the accounting system, including "flow-through funds" to partners.

Payments in 2025

Payment requests/invoices that have not been processed by the deadlines in December 2024 will be paid out in January 2025. Transaction data (payment vouchers, etc.) will be the same as before.

The deadline for sending invoices for costs for 2024 is 20 January 2025. The invoice date for invoices sent in January for costs that are accounted for by the grant recipient for December 2024 is set to 31 December. These invoices must be created within the first 15 working days of January. Otherwise, it is the enterprise itself that bears responsibility for setting the correct date and due date on the invoice in line with the guidelines in the Bookkeeping Regulation or other applicable guidelines for the enterprise.

For projects that must submit an annual project accounting report, the process and deadlines will be the same as in 2024. The deadline for submitting project accounts is thus 20 January 2025.

Project changes

The deadline for major changes to the budget for 2024 (over NOK 500,000) was 1 October 2024.

We do not expect to receive any more changes related to the budget for 2024, while other significant changes, such as changes in partners or project managers, must be reported on an ongoing basis. Budgeted grants for the projects (for 2024) that have not been disbursed by the end of 2024 will be carried over to 2025 and will be disbursed in 2025 or later years.

We expect the budget for 2025 and the remaining budget years to be updated when projects have a relatively good overview of the costs they expect in 2025.