Proposal Submission

Your RA will work with you to create your budget based on your project needs and and sponsor requirements.

The two main categories in a grant budget are Direct Costs and Facilities & Administrative (F&A) or Indirect Cost

Direct Costs are those expenses that can be directly attributed to the work proposed, or are "allocable". They often include the following:

• Personnel Costs: Salaries and wages for University staff directly involved in the project, including fringe benefits like health insurance and retirement contributions. These should reflect the effort that an individual will be committing to the project and is calculated as either percent effort, hourly wages or person months depending on the sponsor. Sponsored Projects requires a minimum level of effort of 1% for Principal Investigators on Federal/Sub-Federal projects. More detail on effort calculations and budgeting salaries can be found here.
• Equipment Costs: Equipment is defined as tangible personal property (including information technology systems) having a useful life of more than one year and an acquisition cost of $5,000 or more per unit.  If you want to include the purchase of equipment in your proposal, please first check that is allowable under the specific funding opportunity. The piece of equipment must be named in the budget and the estimated cost must be based on written quotations or catalog price. Costs for shipping, sales tax, and installation costs can also be included as part of the equipment cost. More detailed guidance can be found here.
• Travel Expenses: Costs associated with travel related to the project, such as conference attendance, site visits, and transportation for University personnel only. Travel expenses for non-University personnel should not be budgeted as travel but should be budgeted as consultant costs, subrecipient costs, or other direct costs, as appropriate. Additional guidance can be found here
  • Current State of Arizona Meals/Lodging reimbursement rates can be found here.
• Materials and Supplies: Consumables used in the performance of your project are included in this category. Examples include laboratory glassware, chemicals, reagents, clinical supplies, laboratory notebooks, and data processing supplies. Office supplies, such as binders, pens, paper, personal computers, flash drives, postage, etc., are usually not allowable as direct costs on grants, unless specifically permitted by the sponsoring agency. Federal agencies normally treat these costs as Facilities & Administrative Costs. More detailed guidance can be found here.
• Participant Support Costs: These are direct costs that support participants and their involvement in a Federal award, such as stipends, subsistence allowances, travel allowances, registration fees, temporary dependent care, and per diem paid directly to or on behalf of participants. They do not include expenses incurred to incentivize or enable research subjects to participate in studies. Further information on this category can be found here.
• Other Direct Costs: A list of common other costs can be found here - please note that these are not allowable costs for all sponsors, so it is very important to check the Funding Opportunity to identify any limitations.
• Indirect Costs: these are Costs incurred that cannot be readily and specifically identified with a particular sponsored project, which are discussed in more detail in the next question.

Indirect Costs (also known as Facilities & Administrative Costs) are costs incurred that cannot be readily and specifically identified with a particular sponsored project. This includes

• Administrative expenses (i.e. Business Office Staff)
• Utilities
• Building renovations, maintenance
• Depreciation, debt service, central administration

Our current Federally negotiated rate, along with a summary of the F&A rates applicable for different activities can be found here. We have to use our federally negotiated rate unless there is a formal stipulation, so always check the funding opportunity for any stipulated rates.

For federally-sponsored projects, indirect costs are typically determined by applying the campus's negotiated F&A rate to the modified total direct cost (MTDC) base. The MTDC base is a subset of the total direct costs of the project, excluding such items as equipment, student tuition, research patient care costs, rent and the first $25,000 of subrecipient charges.

Not all sponsors use an MTDC base for Indirect costs, or have a different exclusions from the federal MTDC base. This distinction has important budgeting consequences, so it is always critical to understand a sponsor's Indirect Cost policy - your RA will be happy to work with you to clarify the correct base and exclusions to apply.

Cost Sharing/Matching – Anything that is necessary for the completion of the project that is not directly funded/paid for by the sponsor. There are number of different types of cost share and, depending on the sponsor, limitations on what can be used as cost share. This is discussed in detail here.

General Rule – If cost sharing/matching is not specifically required by the program, DO NOT include it.

When required by the sponsor (in the funding announcement), be sure it is clearly stated in the budget and justification. Documentation of committed cost share, including source account numbers or signed letter of commitment, must be included in the proposal routing.

Changes in cost share will require a proposal to be re-routed

A budget justification is a written explanation of how the costs in a budget support the goals of a project. It's a key part of a proposal and helps ensure that the requested funds are adequate. A complete and realistic budget and budget justification demonstrates that your project is well conceived and minimizes the chances of a budget reduction. It typically includes

• Cost categories: A detailed explanation of each major cost category, such as salaries, equipment, travel, and supplies.
• Justification: An explanation of why each cost is necessary and how it benefits the project.
• Estimates: How the costs were calculated, including inflation factors.
• Lists: A list of items that make up the total costs for each category.
• Time period: When the costs will be expended.

Some useful tips

• Use any templates provided by the sponsor.
• Match the order and titles of the budget form, this will make it easier for reviewers to follow.
• Try to provide concise explanations of each budget item, try to avoid unnecessary detail

Once you have finalized your proposal budget with your RA, they will be able to provide you with draft budget justifications for you to review and edit.

If you want to collaborate with other organizations on a proposal, and the University of Arizona will be the lead applicant, then the first stage is to determine whether this collaboration would be through a sub-recipient or Vendor relationship. 

To do this, you should complete the Sub-recipient Qualification form. This asks a number of questions based on the scope of work that will be undertaken by the organization to help you determine the most appropriate relationship.

If this results in a determination that a vendor relationship is more appropriate, engagement with the vendor will occur after the award is made, through standard processes managed by Purchasing Services. If, however, this identifies that this should be a sub-recipient relationship (often referred to as a Sub-award) then we will need to collect the following documents from them before we are able to route your proposal for review.  

• Completed Sub-recipient commitment form
  • FDP Subrecipient Commitment Form: If the sub-recipient is an FDP Expanded Clearinghouse participant, use this form.
  • Subrecipient Commitment Form: use for all other sub-recipients.
• Scope of Work to include work to be performed by sub-recipient as well as deliverables and milestones
• Detailed budget
• Budget justification or budget narrative
• Letter of support as required by Request for Proposal (RFP)
• Copy of F&A rate agreement (if applicable)

Here in ALVSCE we request that this information is provided 10 business days prior to the submission date. Your RA will ask you for contact details for the sub-award and can contact them directly to provide details of the documents required and the due date.   Please be mindful that other institutions also have internal routing requirements, so if you are considering a sub-award please let them and your RA know as soon as possible to allow sufficient time for all documents to be preapred and approved in a timely manner.

Additional details on Subawards can be found here.

As an Institution we need to comply with a host of federal, state and local regulations that govern research. There are several compliance and safety units at the University of Arizona that help Investigators navigate these regulations and requirements. Full details of all these units can be found here.

We will concentrate on those units that are required to review and approve your proposal prior to submission.

• Office for Responsible Outside Interest (OROI)– COI, Organizational Conflicts of Interest
• Sponsored Projects Services – Allowability of costs, budget calculations, reviews proposal contents against the funding announcement, Institutional approval
• Office of Research Contracts – Terms & Conditions (as needed)

These reviews and approvals are primarily managed through the internal proposal routing system,  UAccess Research.

Compliance - OROI

Our institutional Conflict of Interest & Commitment Policy can be found here. This policy is supported by a disclosure system, eDisclosure, which allows the OROI team to identify conflicts of interest and commitment, and appropriately eliminate or manage them. At the proposal stage their role is to ensure that every person who meets the definition of “investigator” for a federal or sub federal proposal, is COI Compliant. This means that each individual has:

• Completed the Conflict of Interest required training 
• Submitted a certification in the last 364 days (Annual disclosure, research certification or an Update)

COI review proposals during the routing stage – they are the last approvers before Sponsored Projects, and will not approve the proposal until all individuals are compliant.

Compliance – Sponsored Projects Services

Sponsored Projects Services (SPS) must receive proposals in final form (completely approved in UAccess Research (UAR) and ready for submission to the sponsoring agency) three full business days prior to the sponsor's due date. The sponsor due date is not included in this 3 business day calculation. Full information about SPS’ internal deadlines can be found here.

What does a Sponsored Projects Review cover?

• Checks the budget is calculated correctly, uses correct IDC base
• Checks the budget justification to see that items are all in the right category (e.g., is that person you’re paying really a participant? Or should they be paid as a consultant), making sure that costs are allowable, and match the budget.
• Reviews the abstract for compliance issues such as human or animal subjects, etc.
• Reviews forms and required documents for completeness/accuracy, including page and word limits.

Sangita Judge, PhD MBA is the Authorized Organizational Representative (AOR) for the University of Arizona. Individuals in Sponsored Projects have been delegated signatory Authority on her behalf for all proposals submitted for by the University of Arizona. This means that they are responsible for the final submission of proposals to federal sponsors, for example electronic submission (Grants.gov, ASSIST, eCivis, Research.gov, NSPIRES, eZFedGrants, etc.)

Other sponsors may also require AOR approval for submission, and your RA will help you identify if this is necessary for the proposal you are working on.

If AOR submission is not required, you may submit once Sponsored Projects has reviewed and approved your proposal

Compliance – Office of Research Contracts (ORC)

Sponsors sometimes include specific terms and conditions in their funding announcements. These can be obvious – for example including a draft grant agreement in the funding announcement, or text in the funding announcement. Unfortunately, they can also be hidden in sponsor templates or in the sponsor submission portal. Your RA can help you find these - but for sponsor portals where you will be submitting the final proposal, please print or screenshot the application form to share with your RA.

Terms and conditions that need to be reviewed by the Office of Research Contracts (ORC) or documents that require ORC signature require between 7 - 10 business days for review and/or negotiation. Sponsored Projects will not approve a proposal until all Terms & Conditions have been reviewed and approved/signed by ORC.

UAccess Research (UAR) is the University of Arizona's electronic proposal submission and award management system. All proposals for external funding are submitted and routed for review/approval by the Principal Investigators/Co-Principal Investigators, Departments, Colleges, and the Sponsored Projects & Contracting Services office using UAccess Research. You can log in by clicking on the Research link on the UAccess page.

Your RA is responsible for initiating the proposal in UAR, and will need the following information from you in order to submit the proposal into routing

• Title
• Project Period
• Names of all CO-PIs and Key personnel, including the F&A and Award credit split you would like each individual to have.  
  • F&A split describes how you would like the F&A revenue received from the funding to be distributed between PI and Co-PIs. These amounts are used to inform quarterly F&A revenue distribution at the college level.
  • Credit for Award is allocated by percentage to investigators and departments/colleges. These amounts are used in University publications about externally funded activity.
  • The split for both these activities is typically decided by the PI based on a number of factors – some examples can be found here -and unless there is a reason for it, the splits for Credit tend to follow the splits for F&A.
• Project Abstract, and if we are a subaward, the specific Scope of Work the University of Arizona will be undertaking.
• Detailed Budget
• Budget Justification
• Subaward documents -  we will need to include a Signed Sub-recipient commitment form, Scope of Work, Budget and Budget Justification for each subaward included on the proposal.
• Any required sponsor forms, letters or other documents that require a signature from the Authorizing Official (AOR) for the University of Arizona

Once we have all of these documents, your RA will submit the proposal into UAR for approvals, which occur in the following order:

• Department initiator submits into UAccess workflow
• Principal Investigator, Co-Investigator(s), Key Person(s) and all departments must approve before workflow proceeds - guidance on how to approve a proposal can be found here.
• College(s), and Division(s) if applicable, must approve before the proposal routes to SPS
• Office for Responsible Outside Interest (OROI)– COI, must approve before the proposal routes to SPS
• Sponsored Projects Services

It is really important that you and all other individuals listed on the proposal are available to approve the proposal as soon as possible. If you are aware that anyone will be unavailable to approve during this time, please let your RA know as soon as possible so they can work with you to obtain appropriate approvals.

Once the proposal reaches Sponsored Projects, it will be assigned a reviewer. Sponsored Projects review and submit proposals on a 'first-in, first-out' (FIFO) policy based on when the proposal reaches them in its final form. Depending on the volume of proposals in their workflow this can be within a day or take the full 3 days, this is why there is no guarantee of submission by the sponsor deadline if we fail to meet their three-day deadline.

Sponsored Projects will review the proposal and request edits as needed which may include returning the proposal for a reroute. A list of Proposal changes that would require a re-route can be found here.

If the sponsor does not require final submission by the AOR, Sponsored Projects will approve the UAR proposal and send you a confirmation email containing an Institutional proposal number, or IP#, which will be linked to your proposal and any future awards, so we recommend you keep a copy of this. You are now free to submit the approved documents to the sponsor.

If the sponsor does require final submission by the AOR (typically this is all Federal sponsors and some foundations) Sponsored Projects will pre-approve your proposal and wait for you to release the electronic submission package for review and final submission. This package also needs to be released to them by the 3 day deadline to guarantee submission. During this review, there may be further edits requested to proposal documents, so it is very important that you and your key personnel are available to make updates as needed. Sponsored Projects will email confirmation of a successful submission, including the IP# and any Sponsor assigned ID numbers, which we recommend you keep a copy of for future reference.

Firstly there is no need to worry if you receive this, and no action for you to take!

Typically this will happen when there are edits that Sponsored Projects need to make to the UAR proposal before they can finalize it, for example if there were some small updates to the budget after the proposal had routed, they need to update the Budget Version Tab to match the final submitted budget. In order to make the edits, they have to return the proposal, which automatically generates the approval email, but the updates are made so quickly, that by the time you click on the link the proposal has already been finalized.

Whilst the UAR proposal requires just a few documents to review, a full proposal package will require a lot more.  Details of required documents and their formats, including page limits, can be found in the Funding Opportunity.  Your RA will be happy to produce a document checklist for the specific funding opportunity including links to document templates as needed. Examples of some of the most common documents required include:

• Proposal Narrative
• References Cited
• Facilities , Equipment and Other Resources
• Data Management Plan
• Mentoring plans
• Logic Model
• Letters of Collaboration
• Key personnel documents, including
  • Biosketch
  • Current & Pending support
  • Conflict of Interest/Collaborators and Other Affiliations

Increasingly Biosketches and Current & Pending Supports are required to be certified by each Key Person. For example, NSF requires Biosketches and Current in pending documents be prepared and certified in SciENcv, with NIH introducing a requirement for the use of Common forms from 25th May 2025. Guidance on how to use SciENcv can be found here

Most federal sponsors also have detailed guidance documents to assist with proposal submission, for example:

NSF Proposal & Award Policies Guidance (PAPPG) - this is the source for information about NSF's proposal and award process. Each version of the PAPPG applies to all proposals or applications submitted while that version is effective. This should be read in conjunction with the funding opportunity you are applying to.

NIH Application Guides - Use the application instructions found on this page along with the guidance in the funding opportunity to submit grant applications to NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

USDA NIFA Grants Application Guide - The NIFA Grants Application Guide provides guidance for the preparation and submission of NIFA grant applications via the Grants.gov system. This guide provides general information and references pertaining to the grant application process as well as NIFA-specific instructions and requirements. When applying for a NIFA award, it is important to reference the version of the guide that is included in the specific funding opportunity application package.

Congratulations!

The University now needs to review and accept the funding. Only authorized delegates in the Office of Research Contracts (ORC) can sign agreements on behalf of the University so this stage of the process is managed by the ORC. If you or your department receives an award directly from the sponsor, please contact your RA, who will complete a contract submission cover sheet, and send it to ORC to get the process started.

• Negotiator in ORC is assigned & contacts PI via email with a cc to the appropriate RA.
• Contracting completes award review and negotiation.
• Fully execute award, and hand over to SPS for account set up.
• At this stage a COI Research Certification may be required. This needs to be completed before an account can be set up.

At this point responsibility for award shifts from Preaward (RAs) to Postaward (SPS Postaward Team 1, Academic Unit Business Managers and County Business Managers)

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