A new process was introduced for costing and approving consultancy work (E code projects) in March 2022.
It is not currently possible to fully utilise Worktribe for costing, pricing and approving consultancy projects. RGO does not handle consultancy applications or post award management and only R and GR coded project costings are able to be workflowed through Worktribe to Agresso. As a result, Departments had developed their own consultancy processes and this had resulted in large variation in approaches. The new process aims to harmonise these approaches and will produce a number of benefits, including:
Recording HoD approval in Worktribe, giving clear visibility of sign off to RKEC
Integrating the costing and pricing record with requests for contracts, to provide a single point of reference for consultancy activity
Ensuring accurate fEC costings are consistently produced to inform pricing decisions
Enabling risk and ethics checks to be completed via the existing forms
Enable simpler and more accurate reporting on consultancy.
This process improvement has been approved by the Worktribe Stakeholder Group and the Contracts Operations Group as an interim solution which makes use of the tools we have in a pragmatic way until such a time as we have a more complete solution. It does not constitute a change of policy and you should continue to refer to the institutional guidance on the university web pages to inform your pricing decisions.
RGO will not be involved in setting up Agresso codes or budgets for consultancy and you should continue to follow your standard processes via department Management Accountants for this.
Please refer to the simple guidance on the Research Systems Support Hub wiki pages when costing consultancy; in E&G we would usually use costing Option 1. Research Support (environment-research@york.ac.uk) are happy to cost this for you and advise on the process.