Alterlab Grant Reporting

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

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):

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:

uv 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

1. 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).
2. Pull the deadline with report_deadlines.py from the award dates and lead with it, so the user knows the time pressure.
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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 to alterlab-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.