Submission system

The submission system is the portal tool where the proposal is assembled: Part A completed as online forms, Part B uploaded as PDF, partners added by PIC, budgets entered per participant. It is the only place a submission legally happens. An email to a project officer is not a submission, however friendly the officer.

Access is governed by roles. Only a person holding the right role for the coordinating organisation can press submit, and that role is granted by the LEAR. Every partner must accept its place in the consortium through the system, which means every partner needs its own portal account and its own validated data.

It validates before it accepts, and the validation is stricter than people expect: missing mandatory fields, participants whose data is incomplete, budget arithmetic that does not add up, PDFs that exceed the size limit. Each of these blocks submission, and each takes real time to fix.

Submitting is reversible until the cut-off. You may submit, then submit again, as often as you like; the last accepted version is the one evaluated. This is the single most useful property of the system and the most underused.

After the deadline it becomes the channel for everything else: the evaluation result, the ESR, grant preparation, the signature, and later the reporting and payment requests. The account and roles you set up to apply are the same ones you will use for five years, which is a reason to set them up properly rather than in a hurry.