MANAGING INNOVATE GRANTS - A HIGH LEVEL GUIDE

Let’s start at the top. You’ll need to ring-fence the grant expenditure in your operations and accounting system. So the grant will need an in-house project name that all expenditure can be put to in the book-keeping – it can be anything you like so let’s call the grant PLUTO for the sake of this article.

There are seven cost centres that are required by Innovate and every expenditure must have supporting evidence uploaded to the Innovate portal.

2/OVERHEADS

These are typically set at 20% of labour unless you wish to upload your own overhead calculation. 

4/ CAPITAL USAGE

If you spend money on a piece of capital equipment (i.e. a fixed asset in your accounts) it will have a depreciation rate. It varies from company to company but 5 years is typical. This means that the equipment will have a residual value beyond the end of the grant. You can claim 70% of the depreciation during the grant for the proportion of the time the equipment spends working on the grant.

For example, if you purchase a £40k piece of kit at the start of a 12 month grant and have a five year depreciation rate then it will depreciate by £8k (40 x (12/60)) over the grant. If the kit spends 50% of its time on PLUTO then the capital usage will be £4k (or £1k per quarter) of which you can claim 70%.

6/ OTHER

This will need to have been stated in the grant application – for example a patent application. 

GREAT, THAT’S EVERYTHING READY FOR THE FIRST PROJECT CLAIM – WHATS NEXT? 

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