Research grant staff allocation spreadsheet template (free download)
Most research groups run their grants on a spreadsheet, and most of those spreadsheets were built in a hurry. This one is built properly: staff, grants and allocations in person-months, with each person's load and each grant's staff cost worked out for you. It is free, with nothing to sign up for.
Template version 1 · works in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers · October 2026
Download the template
Download the research grant allocation template (Excel, 21 KB)
It opens in Excel, and in Google Sheets or Numbers if you import it. It comes filled with a worked example, in grey italics, so you can see every check working before you type over it.
What is in it
Six sheets, filled in from left to right. You type into Staff, Projects and Allocations; Monthly load and Project cost work themselves out.
| Sheet | What you put in, or what it shows |
|---|---|
| Read me | How to use it, in ten lines |
| Staff | One row per person: role, FTE, annual salary and on-cost percentage. The monthly cost is calculated |
| Projects | One row per grant: funder, start and end month, and the staff budget |
| Allocations | One row per spell of work: who, on which grant, how many person-months per month, from when to when. Its monthly cost is calculated |
| Monthly load | Each person's total person-months per month across every grant, for 36 months, red where it goes over their FTE |
| Project cost | Each grant's staff cost per month, its total and what is left of the budget, red where it goes over |
How to fill it in
Start with Staff and Projects, then put the work in Allocations. Set the first month in Monthly load, cell B1, and both summary sheets run 36 months from it.
PM in Allocations is person-months per month, the same figure as a share of full time: 1 is full time for that month, 0.5 is half time, 0.2 is a day a week. A row covers every month from its start month to its end month at that figure, so someone moving from 0.5 to 0.3 halfway through a grant is two rows. If you need to turn a percentage of effort or a number of hours into person-months, our post on how to calculate person-months sets out the formula.
On-cost percentage is employer National Insurance and pension on top of salary. 30 percent is a common working figure; your finance office will have the exact one for each grade.
The two checks it does for you
Both checks are the ones funders care about, and both are the ones a hand-built spreadsheet usually misses.
Over-allocation. Monthly load adds each person's person-months across every grant, month by month, and turns a month red when the total goes over their FTE. Nobody can work more than their contract, and funders hold you to it: UKRI lets no more than 100 percent of anyone's FTE be charged across its grants, and Horizon Europe caps each person at 215 day-equivalents a year across all their EU grants. The example's first postdoc goes red in 2027, when a second grant overlaps the first.
Overspend. Project cost multiplies each allocation by the person's monthly cost and adds it up per grant, month by month, then takes the total from the staff budget. The example's second grant goes red, because a full-time postdoc and two part-time allocations cost more over its life than the budget allows.
Where a spreadsheet stops working
A well-built spreadsheet carries a small group a long way. These are the points where groups tend to outgrow one, and it is worth knowing them before you get there.
- More than one person edits it, and the copies drift: the version in the shared drive is not the one in someone's email
- Nothing records who changed an allocation, or when, which is the first thing a funder query asks
- Expenses live somewhere else, so the budget picture is staff only
- It shows where a grant stands, not where it is heading: an underspend appears when the money is already gone
- Pay changes each year, so every salary has to be updated by hand, in every copy
- Each grant has its own reporting periods, and the sums for each one are rebuilt by hand for every report
Moving it into AllocBoard
The Allocations sheet uses the same column names as AllocBoard's staff time import: Staff Name, Funder, PM, Start Month, End Month and Note, with PM as person-months per month for every month in the spell. AllocBoard imports staff time into one project at a time, so keep one project's rows and those six columns, and save them as a CSV or Excel file.
Once it is in, AllocBoard does what the spreadsheet cannot: every change logged with who made it, expenses on the same timeline as the people, budgets forecast to the end of each grant, and anyone over 100 percent flagged across every project the moment it happens. Every plan starts with a free 30-day trial, with no credit card.
Sources
The template is free to use and adapt as you like. The funder rules it checks are summarised in our posts on UKRI full economic costing and Horizon Europe personnel costs, which cite them.
• UKRI, Roles in funding applications: eligibility, responsibilities and costings guidance
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