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SCGC-FIRST Costing Guidelines for Departments’ Finance Office

Please reference this document for the SCGC-FIRST

1.  Overview of Award

SCGC-FIRST fund aims to support visionary and imaginative proposals relevant to global challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

ASEANS's leading innovation company in chemicals, SCGC, takes a special responsibility to tackle these challenges (global warming and plastic waste); towards this end, SCGC has publicly committed to achieve a low-carbon and environmentally friendly society by 2030, and achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. SCGC believes strongly that innovations based on chemistry, materials, and novel processes are key to meeting these bold commitments. To this end, SCGC has made an initial commitment of £1 million to create an internal University administrated fund, SCGC-FIRST, which will run over four years and support applications from across the University. Successfully executed projects will be considered for substantial follow-on funding directly from SCGC.

The creation of SCGC-FIRST builds on a decade-long and highly productive strategic partnership between the Department of Chemistry and SCGC. However, the magnitude of the current challenges requires a broader collaboration among a range of relevant disciplines within the University, including. cutting-edge manufacturing technology and machinery, digital systems to control manufacturing processes, and a low environmental footprint approach to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with clean and renewable energy sources.

SCGC-FIRST is seeking innovative projects that demonstrate distinct advantages in cost and environmental footprint over competing approaches which are already available in the marketplace or opportunities for those to be adapted to the SCGC context below. Projects need to be outcomes-driven, leading toward potential solutions or inventions.

2.  Costing the Proposal

Investigator(s) need to seek approval from their respective Head of Department(s) (or nominee(s)).

Named researcher(s) can be included in both the proposal and X5 if appropriate.

X5 actions

All proposals must be accompanied by a proposed budget prepared using X5, with the budget details output onto the X5 Admin output (AO). In addition, the MPLS Division requires evidence of approval by the Head of Department (or nominee) for the costing, this must be obtained by all participating departments before submission.

  • A trial costing should be created in X5, using the funder SCGC- FIRST (short name SCGC-F) and the Generic scheme.
  • Inflation will be included in the costing.
  • Collaborative costings should be created if costs are going to be incurred in more than one department. The lead department is responsible for adding in the non-lead departments on the project setup screen.
  • Please note that as trial costings do not get submitted into X5 workflow, no system emails will be generated notifying the non-lead departments that costings have been created for them. Instead the lead department should email the costing creators concerned (names and email addresses can be found X5 - list of departmental costing creators).
  • Non-lead departments can find their costings by selecting Drafts ‘by my department’ on the costing dashboard.
  • On collaborative costings the lead will be able to see the combined project costs by going to the Department toggle in their costing and selecting ‘All departments’
  • The AO should be generated for each costing. For collaborative costings this should be done by the lead. Guidance on running the report can be found at X5 admin output.

For clarity, the following costs are allowable:

Directly Incurred costs (DIC) (staff and non-staff):

  • students’ stipends
  • salaries of postdoctoral researchers (full- or part-time)
  • consumables
  • small equipment items (equipment with a value of £10,000 would require justification)

Not Allowed:

  • overhead costs
  • DA Infrastructure Technicians
  • Principal Investigator and Co- Investigator’s time
  • honoraria
  • travel to conferences

Proposals and Costings DO NOT have to be submitted to Research Services. Research Services have agreed this is not necessary.

Any unspent balances at the end of the grant period should be returned to the fund.