Typical mistakes in the periodic financial report

Preparing a periodic report within the 60‑day reporting deadline is a major challenge for Horizon Europe consortia. Coordinators and partners must ensure that reported costs are eligible, correctly calculated, and fully aligned with the activities described in the technical report, while also identifying and clearly explaining any deviations from the original budget.

This webinar provides a practical and structured overview of periodic reporting, covering both the overview of the cost eligibility rules and the most common mistakes in the financial report observed in real projects. Through concrete examples, tools, and templates used in ongoing Horizon Europe projects, participants will learn how to prepare partners for reporting, ensure consistency between financial and technical data, and avoid issues that may lead to clarification requests or payment suspensions.

 

Topics covered:

• Overview of the periodic reporting process, including the roles and responsibilities of partners and coordinators;
• How to prepare partners for periodic reporting within the 60‑day deadline;
• Overview of the Horizon Europe cost eligibility rules, with a focus on personnel cost and purchase costs;
• How to ensure alignment between the financial and technical reports;
• Internal financial and technical reporting processes;
• What constitutes a deviation, and how deviations should be properly explained in terms of both tasks and finances
• Typical mistakes in periodic financial reports, including among others: Over‑ or underspending of person‑months; Insufficient or unclear cost justifications; Misalignment between reported activities and declared costs etc.
• Hands‑on examples based on payment suspension letters from real projects, showing how mistakes could have been avoided;
• Practical tools, templates, and internal checklists to support partner monitoring and early identification of issues;

 

Why Europa Media?   

Europa Media is Europe’s leading provider of practical training courses on EU’s research and innovation programmes. We have 25 years of experience in developing and implementing projects under the Framework Programmes. Under Horizon 2020, we have been involved successfully in over 30 projects, coordinating six of them. Under the first work programmes of Horizon Europe, we are currently involved in 11 collaborative projects, coordinating one of them. Europa Media’s trainers are actual project managers, coordinators, and financial administrators of these projects, sharing their stories and providing you with hands-on tips based on their everyday experience. For the past 20 years, they have been supporting all the major institutions as well as several of the NCPs in the Member States and countries associated to the Framework Programmes. This event, as always, has been designed based on our direct hands-on experience with EU research and innovation proposals and is, therefore, 100% practice-driven. Our practical approach has attracted over 10,000 participants from all over the world in the past 15 years. Read more about our projects here.   

 

Who is this course for?  

If you have already managed projects under Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe and want to level up, this course will help you enhance your knowledge and skills on Horizon Europe Periodic Reporting. 

Feedback from previous participants shows that this course is equally useful for:   

• Project managers and coordinators;   
• Researchers and research administrators;   
• Research advisers, EU grant advisers; 

 

Please note that the webinar recording will not be available after the course has concluded.