Grant Reporting — Post-Award Deliverables Across Funder Formats
Post-award is where money already won has to be kept: funders release the next tranche only when a compliant progress report lands on time, and they claw back or flag awards when reports slip or numbers don't reconcile. This skill drafts those deliverables — progress/annual reports, final reports, milestone and deliverable tracking, budget-vs-actual narratives, and no-cost-extension (NCE) and rebudgeting justifications — in the exact shape each major funder demands.
It is the post-award counterpart to the pre-award proposal skills: it never writes a new proposal or a fresh budget request. It reports against an award that already exists.
When to Use This Skill
Use this skill when the user needs to:
- Draft an NIH RPPR (Research Performance Progress Report) — Annual, Interim, or Final — section by section.
- Draft an NSF annual or final project report, or the public-audience Project Outcomes Report.
- Draft a Horizon Europe / ERC periodic or final report — the technical narrative (Part B) and the structured-table / financial-statement framing.
- Track milestones and deliverables against a workplan and write the status narrative.
- Write a budget-vs-actual (variance) narrative explaining over/under-spend by category.
- Justify a no-cost extension or a rebudgeting / virement request.
- Work out when each report is due from the award start/end dates
(
scripts/report_deadlines.py).
Does NOT Trigger — route these elsewhere
| The request is really about… | Route to |
|---|---|
| Writing a new proposal / project description for NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA, NSTC (pre-award) | alterlab-research-grants |
| A TÜBİTAK proposal (1001, 1002, etc.) — Turkish funder, pre-award | alterlab-tubitak-proposal |
| Akademik Teşvik annual incentive-points application (ÜAK) | alterlab-akademik-tesvik |
| A data management plan / KVKK-compliant DMP for the proposal stage | alterlab-kvkk-dmp |
| A recommendation / reference letter for a student or colleague | alterlab-recommendation-letters |
| Program / department accreditation assessment & assurance-of-learning reports | alterlab-accreditation-aol |
| Verifying that the citations in the report actually exist | alterlab-citation-verifier |
This skill assumes the award is already made. If the user is still competing for funding, stop and route to the pre-award skill above.
The funder formats (verified)
Each funder fixes the structure; do not invent sections. Deep per-funder detail —
every section, what goes in it, and which sections apply to which report type —
lives in references/funder_formats.md. The
essentials:
NIH — RPPR (submitted in eRA Commons)
Three report types share one section skeleton (A–I):
| § | Title | Note |
|---|---|---|
| A | Cover Page | |
| B | Accomplishments | goals, what was done, results, dissemination |
| C | Products | publications, datasets, software, IP |
| D | Participants | personnel + effort; D.1 is the only Section D item required on Interim/Final |
| E | Impact | impact on the field, other disciplines, society |
| F | Changes | changes/problems; rebudgeting & scope changes surface here |
| G | Special Reporting Requirements | |
| H | Budget | Annual (non-SNAP) only — not on Interim/Final |
| I | Outcomes | required on Interim & Final, public-facing |
Report types: Annual (next budget period), Interim (filed with a competing renewal — becomes the Final report if the renewal is not funded), Final (closeout). See the references file before drafting.
NSF — project reports (submitted in Research.gov)
- Annual project report — that year's activities and broader impacts.
- Final project report — refers only to the final funded year (it is not cumulative).
- Project Outcomes Report (POR) — a public-audience summary of no more than 800 words, separate from the final report.
Horizon Europe / ERC — periodic & final reports (EU Funding & Tenders Portal)
- A Technical Report in two parts: Part A (structured tables, generated by the Portal from the Continuous Reporting module) and Part B (the narrative, mirroring the application form and reporting differences/deviations).
- A Financial Report: individual and consolidated Financial Statements (plus a Certificate on the Financial Statements where the threshold applies).
- A Continuous Reporting module that stays open for the whole project and feeds Part A automatically.
Deadlines — compute them, don't guess
Reporting deadlines are deterministic functions of the award dates, and missing one can suspend payments. Use the helper instead of recalling rules from memory:
bashuv run python skills/faculty-life/alterlab-grant-reporting/scripts/report_deadlines.py \ --funder nih-snap --budget-period-start 2026-09-01 --project-end 2028-08-31
It encodes only the verified rules (sourced in references/funder_formats.md):
- NIH SNAP Annual RPPR ≈ 45 days before the next budget period start; non-SNAP ≈ 60 days before; Final RPPR within 120 days of the period-of-performance end.
- NSF annual report 90 days before the budget-period end; final report and Project Outcomes Report within 120 days after the award end date.
- Horizon Europe / ERC periodic (and final) report within 60 days after each reporting period ends.
The script prints the computed due dates as a table or JSON; it does no network I/O and always tells the user to confirm against the funder's own notice of award, because programs can override these defaults.
How to draft a report
- Identify the funder and report type first — that fixes the template. If the user hasn't said, ask (NIH vs NSF vs EU; Annual vs Final).
- Pull the deadline with
report_deadlines.pyfrom the award dates and lead with it, so the user knows the time pressure. - Gather the inputs the sections need: aims/objectives and milestones, what was accomplished this period, products (publications, data, software), personnel and effort, and the budget figures (planned vs actual).
- Draft section by section in the funder's own order and headings. Never merge or rename funder sections. For each accomplishment, tie it back to a stated aim or deliverable.
- Write the variance narrative for any budget category off plan: state the
planned vs actual amount, the reason, and the corrective action or the
rebudgeting/NCE request it motivates. Detail and templates:
references/budget_variance.md. - For an NCE or rebudgeting request, use the justification structure in
references/nce_rebudget.md: unspent-funds status, the programmatic reason, the revised timeline, and the explicit confirmation that no new scope or new funds are requested. - Flag, never fabricate. Where a number, a publication, or an outcome is
missing, mark it
[TODO: confirm]for the user — do not invent figures, dates, DOIs, or results. If citations are involved, hand the reference list toalterlab-citation-verifier.
Guardrails
- No invented facts. Budget figures, effort percentages, milestone dates,
publication details, and award numbers come only from the user's materials. Mark
anything missing as a
[TODO]placeholder. - The user submits, not the skill. This skill drafts text; the user files it through eRA Commons / Research.gov / the EU Funding & Tenders Portal. The skill has no portal access and claims none.
- Confirm deadlines against the notice of award. The calculator encodes the general rules; specific programs and cooperative agreements can override them.
- Reporting period boundaries matter. An NSF final report covers only the final funded year; an NIH Final RPPR adds Section I Outcomes. Don't carry the wrong scope across report types.
References
references/funder_formats.md— full NIH RPPR A–I section guide (with which sections apply to Annual/Interim/Final), NSF report types, and Horizon Europe / ERC report structure, each with its source.references/budget_variance.md— budget-vs-actual narrative template, variance categories, and worked examples.references/nce_rebudget.md— no-cost-extension and rebudgeting/virement justification structures and the questions each funder asks.scripts/report_deadlines.py— stdlib-only report-deadline calculator.
Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.
