The University’s definition of consultancy is 'work undertaken which relies on a member of staff's academic expertise such as advice to industry or government departments'. This could include 'offering specialist opinion, advising on technical issues, or solving problems for firms'. There can be a fine line between consultancy, research, and research-related projects. If you're unsure what your project should be classed as, please check the Frascati Definition of research, or ask Research Support for advice.
Things to bear in mind:
- As a Department, we charge 120% fEC for consultancy (i.e. higher than the cost of the work)
- If you are doing consultancy for a charity, you can request permission from the Head of Department to charge 100% fEC (the full cost of the work)
- Consultancy is VAT-able and 20% VAT should be added to any quotes; you should make clear whether the cost is inclusive or exclusive of VAT in communications with the funder
- Consultancy costs need to be approved and contracts need to be in place before undertaking the work; please allow time for this.
Consultancy Process:
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 as we do for research and research-related projects. RGO does not handle consultancy applications or post award management and only research and research-related project costings can be workflowed through Worktribe to Agresso (our finance system). As a result, Departments had developed their own consultancy processes and this 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 (contracts team)
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. This involves completing a project code form, which is then signed by the Head of Department and the Management Accountant.
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 the first point of contact if you wish to undertake consultancy, and will guide you through the internal process.