What is Worktribe and do I need to use it?

Worktribe is the system the University of York uses to determine the full economic cost (fEC) of a project.

The full economic cost is the full and complete cost to the institution of doing a research project. This includes salaries for the project team, travel expenses, dissemination costs etc. It also includes institutional overhead costs (estates and indirect costs), the running costs for the institution as a whole.

Even if the funder doesn’t require you to outline the full economic cost of the project, and even if they don’t require a budget from you (i.e. it’s a first stage application only) you budget still needs to be entered onto Worktribe.

There are several advantages to Worktribe:

It gives you the information you need to know about what the actual costs of your project are and what income you can expect.
It tells you what to ask the funder for, so you can include the correct figures on your application.
It gives the University of York the details about what the full project costs are so they can plan and manage accordingly – most funders don’t pay the full cost of a project and it’s up to the university to fund the rest. They need to know this information!

However, Worktribe is more than just a costing tool. The system touches on all points of the research grant life cycle, including bid development and approval for submitting your application (at both the departmental and instututional levels). You will also be able to use the system to see the expenditure on your live awards.

There may be elements of Worktribe that you will need to complete, i.e. the Ethics declaration, but the good news is the HRC can do the costing bit for you and can guide you through all the necessary steps, just get in touch (contact our Senior Research Co-ordinator, Sarah Burton, in the first instance at sarah.burton@york.ac.uk). See Costing your Project for details.