Financial Section of Interim/Final Report

Annex 5a

Standard Template

Financial Section of Interim/Final Report

Name of the Asia-wide Programme : Asia- Link Programme
Contract reference no.:TH/Asia Link/010 (111084)
Project Title:EASTWEB - building an integrated leading Euro-Asian higher education and research community in the field of the SemanTic WEB
Name of Beneficiary:Università degli Studi di Trento
Period covered by this Interim report: January1 – December 31, 2007
Due date of this Interim report: January 1, 2008
Project Budget / EUR 1.039.087,70
Funds Disbursed by Commission to date / EUR 210.000,00+210.000
Expenditure Incurred by Project to date /

EUR € 200.384 +239.318

The Financial Section of the Interim Reports and of the Final Report has to be presented as a breakdown of expenditures in a table format. This breakdown of expenditure should specify how the financial resources foreseen in the budget of the contract were used to carry out the activities described in the technical section of the report. It must be laid out in such a way as to allow comparison between the means envisaged and the means actually employed. The report shall cover the Action as a whole, regardless of which part of it is financed by the Contracting Authority.

The template provided is an Excel document that should facilitate the preparation of the financial section of the reports and a fictitious example is provided illustrating some of the cases you might encounter. This template will have to be adapted in accordance with the specificity of your project’s budget. In general, it will consist of:

• A Summary: Summary sheet that provides the overall picture for the period covered and the preceding periods (in the case of the final report, this will reflect the entire duration of the project).
• Annexes:

(1)One sheet per budget heading (in accordance with the headings in your contract) that provides the detail of the actual expenditure per heading for the period covered. In the template (Annex 5B standard template), these sheets are referred as Annexes A to F. In addition, a sheet (Annex G) is attached which provides data related to the expenditure versus income per partner institution and per year.

(2)One additional document providing explanations and justification on any discrepancy that may have arisen as well as a brief reminder of the reallocation made within budget headings and between budget headings (if any) following the 15 % rule (refer to point 6.4.2 of the Guide to Beneficiaries) during the period under review.

Summary

The project management required strong efforts and a long negotiation to achieve the preliminary goal of having signed the Consortium agreement organised as an almost homogeneous set of bilateral agreements with slight differences among them in order to better meet the partners diversity also in administrative needs.

An initial poor understanding of co financing system and some changes in the availability of governmental funds for some of the partners required the redistribution of tasks and funds.

The additional time requested to settle these aspect has produced a late start of project activities whose actual and more regular speed is indeed to be recorded from November 2006 on.

After the first 12 months Eastweb were able to spend only half of the first EU instalment.

Nevertheless in the first half of 2007it could achieve the goal of 70% of expected costs and we could ask for the second instalment. Since then the project activities and related costs followed a more progress, particularly after the “partners special meeting” specifically organised in April 2007 to assess and raise the partners awareness and “sense of belonging” Therefore we have separately reported months between 13-18 and this reports covers the months 19-24. The reporte highlight the fact that in thetwo halves of 2007we could partially recover lost time.

After the first half and as follow up of the partners meeting a new revised budget, slightly different from the submitted Original Budget, reflected the agreed changes in the project management and partners had an increase both in amount and mobility.

Following the EU rule regarding the total of each subsection can vary up to 15% so that these modifications did not create problems even if we get a further approval from the Commission.

SUBTOTAL DIRECT COSTS OF THE ACTION

the total budget is Euro 1 039 087.70, is unchanged : the actual funding from EU is only 750.000 which corresponds to approx 72.18%.

The total EU financing is to be transferred in 4 installments: 3 annual installments of 210.000 Euro during the project life, and a final transfer of at most 120.000 Euro after the approval of eligible expenses.

The second instalment has been recently transferred therefore we advanced the payment of related costs.

Each partner should therefore co-finance the project with approx 27.82% of his share, for a total amount of 289 087.87. The “Revised co-funding” evidences a different share of co funding among the partners that reflects the commitment undersigned in each bilateral agreement

Slight changes in the budget, already reported, regard the increased amount of time for Staff costs , some reduction in travel costs and implemented activities for mobility grants.

All relevant activities are recorded in blue in the relevant budget lines, sometimes missing amount means that relevant documents are still missing or unsatisfactory,

In the same way (black rows) sometime we could record late documents related to costs arisen in former period.

In few cases (yellow highlight) the amount of original document has been splitted into different

Budget items.

Finally a number of costs has not been claimed (yet) by the partners and are still marked as NA The same occurs for some travel costs when a single travel covers 2 different mobility activities (eg partners meeting+ visiting professorship or mobility to Austria+ Italy)

Do not forget to sign your report!