The business case for research project management software

The short answer

Most research groups run their grants on spreadsheets: one for who is on which project, another for each budget, and a third for expenses. Keeping them in line costs a project manager hours every week and a principal investigator time checking them, and the costliest mistakes, an overspend, a stranded underspend or someone booked over 100 percent across grants, tend to surface only when a reporting period has closed.

Software built for this pays for itself in three ways. It gives back staff time, it catches money problems while there is still time to act on them, and it leaves a record that survives an audit, a funder query and a change of staff. For a department or division it adds one view across every group, which spreadsheets kept by each group cannot give.

Where the time goes today

The work is spread across several people, which is why it is easy to underestimate. Each of them does a share of the same job: keeping a picture of people, money and time true for every grant, every month.

• Project manager or research administrator: updates the allocation and budget spreadsheets, reconciles them against finance reports, and rebuilds the figures each time a funder asks for a report
• Principal investigator: checks those spreadsheets for clashes and overspends, and answers the question of who has room for a new project from memory
• Researchers: are asked, again, what share of their time went to which grant
• Department or division manager: gathers each group's spreadsheets to see staffing and spend across the unit, in as many formats as there are groups

Putting a number on the time

The time is the easiest part to cost, and the sum is short enough to do with your own group's numbers. For each person, take the hours a week they spend keeping the spreadsheets in line, the share of that the software would take away, and what an hour of their time costs the university.

Hours back a year = hours a week × 52 × share saved

Cost of an hour = salary × on-costs ÷ 52 ÷ weekly hours

On-costs are employer National Insurance and pension on top of salary; 1.3 is a common working figure, and your finance office will have the exact one. Do not count all of today's time as saved: somebody still runs the allocations and the budget, in the software rather than around it.

We work this through for a project manager and a principal investigator, person by person, on our pricing page, with every assumption stated so you can swap in your own.

The money at risk

Staff time is the smaller number for most groups. The larger one is grant money lost to problems found too late, and the funders' own rules are what make lateness expensive. How each of these rules works is set out in our guides to UKRI virement, UKRI full economic costing and Horizon Europe personnel costs.

A record that outlasts the people

Grants run for three to five years, and the people who keep their spreadsheets change jobs. A record held in software rather than in one person's files is worth something at three moments in particular.

• A funder query or an audit: who was on which grant, at what share, month by month, and who changed it
• The final report: person-months and spend for each reporting period, exported rather than rebuilt from old files
• A handover: whoever takes over starts from the record, not from a folder of versions

What a department or division gets

A single group mostly saves time. A department or division also gets something it cannot assemble from each group's own spreadsheets: one picture across all of them, in the same shape.

• Staffing across every group at once: who is committed where, who is overloaded, and who has room for the next bid
• Budget risk across the whole portfolio, graded the same way for every project, so attention goes to the grants that need it
• Each group's data kept separate, so a group sees its own grants and the unit sees the whole
• One way of costing, allocating and reporting, so a new group or a new manager does not start from a blank spreadsheet

How it is usually paid for

Usually through overheads, not as a line on one grant. Software for running research is an administrative cost, and funders pay for administration through each grant's indirect costs: UKRI's full economic costing includes indirect costs for the organisation's administration and shared services, and Horizon Europe adds a flat rate of 25 percent of eligible direct costs for indirect costs. Those payments fund departmental and central budgets, which is where a tool like this is normally bought from.

Charging it directly to a single grant is usually not allowed, because the indirect costs already cover it. Your research office can confirm what applies at your university.

Questions to ask before you buy

• Does it hold allocations in person-months, month by month, including part-time and partial allocations?
• Does it put staff, budgets and expenses on one timeline, or will you still reconcile them by hand?
• Does it warn before someone goes over 100 percent across grants, and before a budget is overspent?
• Can it import what you have, from spreadsheets or from your research office's system?
• Where is the data hosted, is there a data processing agreement, and will your information governance team accept it?
• Is the price published, and is it per user or per group?
• Can you try it on real grants before anyone signs?

Where AllocBoard fits

AllocBoard is built for the research group running the grants, not for the central research office, and is priced the same way: by the number of research staff a group manages, not per user. Its prices are published on the pricing page.

• Allocations in person-months, per person, per project and per month, with partial allocations
• Anyone over 100 percent allocation highlighted automatically, across all their projects
• Expenses and budgets on the same timeline as the allocations, with budget forecasting that projects final spend with a confidence band
• Portfolio risk analysis that re-scores every project every 24 hours and keeps each run, on the Group and Portfolio plans
• Multiple research groups with isolated data, for a manager who looks after more than one
• Audit logging, with logs kept for as long as the account is on a paid plan, and CSV export of allocations, audit logs and reports
• Import from Worktribe exports or from a spreadsheet template
• Data hosted in the UK, with a data processing agreement for university procurement
• A free 30-day trial with every feature switched on and no credit card

Sources

This guide summarises the funders' own terms and guidance. It is not financial or audit advice: your grant agreements and your research office have the final word.

• UKRI, Terms and conditions of FEC grants, version 16, updated 1 October 2026: RGC 10 final expenditure statement

• STFC, Indirect costs (updated 8 May 2026)

• STFC, Estates

• European Commission, EU Grants AGA, Annotated Grant Agreement, version 2.0, 1 April 2025: Article 6.2.A personnel costs and Article 6.2.E indirect costs

• European Commission, Horizon Europe and Euratom Model Grant Agreement, version 1.2, 1 June 2026: Article 5.1 maximum grant amount and Article 6.2.E indirect costs