Reporting (grant reporting)

Two reporting regimes run in parallel, and it is these that get confused.

Continuous reporting

Not linked to payments, done through a dedicated tool on the portal. It covers progress against milestones, submitted deliverables, responses to critical risks, and programme indicators: publications, communication, intellectual property, open data, training, gender.

Periodic reporting

This is what the money depends on. It has a technical part – work carried out, progress, publishable summary, key indicators – and a financial part: individual and consolidated financial statements, an explanation of the use of resources, and certificates on the financial statements where required.

The deadline is 60 days after the end of the reporting period. The Commission has 90 days for an interim or final payment from receiving the report.

Signing a financial statement, you confirm the information is complete and true, the costs eligible and supported by adequate records, and – in the final report – that all receipts are declared.

Certificate on the financial statements

Not a project audit but an agreed-upon-procedures engagement by a qualified independent external auditor (for public bodies, a competent independent public officer).

The threshold is EUR 430,000 of requested EU contribution to costs, calculated per beneficiary, not per consortium. For beneficiaries with a systems and processes audit it rises to EUR 725,000. In Horizon Europe the certificate is submitted only at the final payment.

Treat this figure with care. Two official documents diverge: the Horizon Europe model grant agreement gives 430,000, while the portal's general online manual gives 325,000 for the 2021–2027 period. The smaller figure is most likely the corporate one shared across programmes and the larger one specific to Horizon Europe. What governs you is the Data Sheet of your own agreement.

Two traps around the certificate cost real money. If it is mandatory and you do not submit it, the EU contribution is capped at the threshold minus one euro – at 429,999. And if you submit one when it was not required, the cost of it is ineligible, because it was not necessary for the action.

Advice from the Commission itself

Declare all eligible costs, even above the Annex 2 budget. The grant is still capped at the maximum amount, but the overrun helps if some costs are rejected. Costs not declared in an individual financial statement are not counted at all; errors from earlier periods are corrected by adjustment in a later report.

On the length of periods

There is no hard rule that a reporting period lasts 18 months in the current General Annexes. Period boundaries are fixed in your grant agreement during grant preparation – look there, not in general guidance.