Actual costs

Actual costs are the default: you charge what you really spent, and you prove it. Salaries from payroll, equipment from invoices and depreciation schedules, travel from tickets, consumables from purchase records. What you claim must be traceable back through your own books to a document a stranger can check.

For personnel this means recording time. Horizon Europe works in days: the daily rate is the annual personnel costs divided by 215 days, and no person may declare more than 215 days in a year across all EU grants combined. Someone working on two EU projects has to be able to show that the days do not overlap.

The reliability of the record is what is tested, not its elaborateness. Monthly declarations signed by the person and their supervisor, consistent with leave records and with what the person is paid for elsewhere, survive an audit. Timesheets reconstructed at the end of the reporting period from memory do not, and reconstructing them is the single most common finding against beneficiaries.

The burden is real, which is why the alternatives exist. Unit costs replace proof of spend with a fixed price per unit; lump sums replace it with proof of completed work. If your organisation has no timesheet culture, an actual-cost grant is more expensive to administer than it first appears.

Currency adds a step for beneficiaries outside the euro area: costs are converted at defined rules rather than at whatever rate suits, and exchange losses are not eligible. Decide the conversion approach at the start of the project, and apply it identically in every period.