As you complete your application, you might encounter the following terms:
This is the main person who is responsible for the research project or grant application. They oversee the project's planning, execution and reporting, and act as the primary contact between us and the research team.
This refers to the organisation or institution where you will conduct your study or project. This is the organisation that will directly receive funding should the award be successful.
These are individuals supporting your application such as joint lead applicants, co-investigators and named research staff members.
These are individuals who may supply research materials, provide specific expertise or access to patient samples, but who are not involved in the day-to-day running of the proposal.
To access Flexi-Grant, you’ll need to create an account. You can do this from the login page.
Once you’ve registered for an account, you’ll need to create an online CV as part of your Flexi-Grant profile. Your CV should include academic and research experience, degree class, supervisors, grants and prizes.
Your career history section should detail all your research positions since your PhD, including Group Leaders’ names, titles and institutions.
You should also provide a comprehensive publication list with author details, publication year, title and DOI or page numbers. For large consortium papers, list the first 12 authors followed by ‘et al.’ and indicate your place in the author list. If you’re using ORCID, manually enter author details as it does not pull author lists.
We may contact you using the information on your profile, so make sure your contact details are always accurate and up to date.
Your email address is your username on the system, so if your email isn’t recognised, you can register as a new user, but do check for duplicate accounts first.
If you’re having trouble logging in, use the 'forgotten password' function to reset your password. If you know your current password but would like to change it, log in and navigate to ‘My Account’ and select ‘Change Password.’
If you’re locked out of your account, or need to change personal details on your account such as your name or email address, you can email us for support.
Contact usYou should submit your application via Flexi-Grant unless otherwise specified in scheme-specific guidelines.
We often request that you contact us for a confidential discussion before applying. Whether this is required and who to contact will be specified in our funding scheme pages. In these circumstances, applicants fitting the remit will be provided with a link to start an application. Where discussion is not required, options to start an application can be found on the ‘Available Grants’ page.
You can access your applications that are in progress via the ‘My applications & awards’ tab (provided you have clicked through the initial agreement page). From here, you can access the online application form for a specific application through the ‘Application’ tab.
Be sure to save your progress regularly by clicking the ‘save progress’ button at the bottom of each page, and make sure each section in the ‘Application’ tab is marked ‘100% complete’ before submission.
Explore specific schemes for additional guidance
Depending on the scheme, you can add supporting participants to your application, such as joint lead applicants, co-investigators and named research staff. To do this, go to the ‘Participants’ tab in the summary section and add their details. This will invite them to update their CV and finalise their contributions.
They must log into Flexi-Grant to participate, so make sure their email addresses are accurate and check if they already have a Flexi-Grant account with us to avoid duplicate accounts. Your invited participants can also reject your invitations, so check regularly whether they have responded to avoid delays in submitting your application.
Depending on the funding scheme, you may be required to invite your designated academic or clinical head of department. They will need to upload a signed letter of support.
You may add a single application support contact to help with the costs and AMRC sections of your application.
Collaborators should not be added in this section.
There is more detail on who you need to include and what they’ll need to provide in scheme-specific guidance.
We are an inclusive funder and hope to attract, support and retain a diverse range of researchers. When you start your application, you will be asked questions to help us monitor diversity. While we encourage you to complete this section in full, you’re entitled to select ‘Prefer not to say’ for any question.
The information gathered is confidential, will not influence our funding decisions and will only be used for anonymised analysis of sector-wide trends. Data will be securely stored in compliance with UK law and our Privacy Policy.
Details about anonymised, aggregated data sharing are outlined in the form.
Read our report on diversity data in our research
When completing your application, remember to save your progress regularly by clicking the ‘save progress’ button at the bottom of each page, and make sure each section in the ‘Application’ tab is marked ‘100% complete’ before you submit.
Your host institution must approve your application before the published deadline, or we won’t receive your submission. We recommend letting your research office know once you’ve submitted your application so they can approve it before the deadline.
Once we’ve received your application, our funding committees will review your application to make sure they have all the information they need to make a decision. It may also undergo peer review depending on the scheme.
Learn about our funding review process
Once we’ve made a decision, you will receive feedback and be notified of the outcome of your application. If you are successful, you will receive a Grant Award Letter (GAL), which both you and your host institution must accept in Flexi-Grant. The GAL itself will not appear in the system, but you will receive and be able to view and download this as a PDF via email.
There are a couple of processes which are managed through Flexi-Grant once you’ve received your grant.
Your host institution will manage financial reconciliations and view remittance information through Flexi-Grant. Financial reconciliation forms will be available in the system within a month of the award ending.
Scientific milestone reports (SMRs) are mostly requested over email from your research grants manager. A few of our schemes use automated SMRs through Flexi-Grant, and if that is the case, you will receive an email from the system requesting you submit the report by a set deadline.
With Researchfish now in place, if attributable publications are required for a scientific milestone report, you can download this directly from the platform and upload this document in the scientific milestone report.
We no longer require a final report for most of our funding schemes. There are some exceptions to this, and existing grantees will be notified about how this will affect them. Specific reporting requirements are also outlined in GALs.
Find out more about reporting research outputs
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