When to apply When a CRIS or research-finance system needs to carry the full funding lifecycle as structured metadata — calls, applications, awards, indirect costs, no-cost extensions, current-and-pending support — rather than only the headline award figure.
Before you start
Prerequisites
What needs to be in place before you operationalise Funding lifecycle and financial vocabulary terminology in your CRIS or repository.
- A CRIS with native Application and Award entity types (Pure, Symplectic, Worktribe, Converis all qualify)
- A funder list keyed to ROR or Crossref Funder Registry IDs, not freeform names
- A controlled vocabulary for award status (applied, under_review, awarded, declined, withdrawn, in_progress, completed, no_cost_extension, terminated)
- Agreement with finance on which indirect-cost rate fields are structured and which remain freeform
- Familiarity with the biosketch / current-and-pending formats your researchers must produce (NIH biosketch, NSF current-and-pending, UKRI Resumé for Research and Innovation)
Deployment
Five steps to deploy
Each step is small enough to land in a single sprint or a single sitting with the relevant CRIS administrator. Follow in order.
Capture the Call entity
Treat funding calls as their own records: funder, scheme_name, scheme_url, deadline, eligibility_summary, expected_total_pot, expected_award_size, call_open_date, call_close_date. Many institutions skip this and lose the institutional memory of "what we applied for and who else applied".
Capture Application as a distinct entity from Award
An application is not an award. Store applications with status, applied_amount, requested_start_date, requested_end_date, role_of_PI, co-applicants (with ORCIDs), Application → Call relationship, decision_date, outcome.
Capture Award with full financial structure
For awarded applications, mint an Award record with the legal award identifier, awarded_amount, direct_costs, indirect_costs, indirect_cost_rate, start_date, end_date, sponsor_internal_reference, payment_schedule. Subawards and pass-throughs are separate Award records linked back to a parent Award.
Wire CRediT-for-grants and current-and-pending export
When a researcher needs to file an NIH biosketch or NSF current-and-pending, the CRIS should be able to emit a populated document from structured fields. Pure, Symplectic, and Worktribe all support templating against the Award entity.
Test no-cost-extension and de-obligation
Pick a recent grant that received an NCE and one that was de-obligated. Verify that NCE updates extend end_date without losing the original end_date, and that de-obligation reduces awarded_amount with an audit-trail entry rather than a destructive edit.
Worked example
Sample workflow
A realistic walk-through of a single record passing through the Funding lifecycle and financial vocabulary pipeline once the checklist is in production.
Integration points
CRIS and repository systems
Vendor-specific notes on where this vocabulary fits in real research-information systems. Names appear here only where there is public field evidence — they are not vendor partnerships.
Pure has Application and Award as first-class entities with strong financial structure; the Crossref Funder Registry crosswalk is native.
Grant entity supports the application-to-award lifecycle; biosketch templating is available via the Elements Reporting Database or via export to ORCID and downstream tools.
Strong native pre-award and post-award lifecycle, with Calls, Applications, Awards, Variations all as distinct objects; popular in UK higher education for this reason.
Funding lifecycle module covers calls through close-out; integrates with the Web of Science Funding-Acknowledgement data feed.
Federation target, not a CRIS — but emit award metadata in the funder's structured-data feed format where available, especially for current-and-pending exports.
What goes wrong in the field
Common pitfalls
The patterns that show up repeatedly when this checklist is skipped or misapplied. Address these before they become entrenched.
- Storing funder names as freeform strings instead of Crossref Funder Registry / ROR IDs, breaking downstream funder-attribution aggregation
- Recording only awarded grants and dropping the rejected applications, losing the data needed for success-rate reporting
- Treating no-cost extensions as a destructive edit to end_date — keep the original date
- Storing indirect-cost rate as part of awarded_amount instead of as a separate field, breaking direct-versus-indirect splits
- Failing to link Awards to the Publications and Datasets they funded, so funder-attribution at output time falls back to free-text acknowledgements
Frequently asked
Implementation FAQ
- Who maintains this checklist?
- The Funding lifecycle and financial vocabulary working group maintains the checklist alongside the dictionary terms in the same domain. It is reviewed each release cycle (March and September) and updated when a working-group consultation, a vendor product change, or a federation-partner schema update materially changes the operational guidance.
- What if my CRIS or repository is not listed?
- The integration points listed name the systems CASRAI has direct field experience with — Pure, Symplectic Elements, Worktribe, Converis, DSpace and DSpace-CRIS, EPrints, VIVO, Dataverse, Invenio-RDM. The CERIF mapping in the checklist is vendor-neutral and applies equally to other CRIS or repository products. If your system supports the underlying entities (Person, Project, Output, Funding, plus the domain-specific extensions), the steps transfer.
- How do I validate my implementation?
- Three validation surfaces. First, the deposit form should refuse a record missing required fields rather than warn and accept. Second, the resulting metadata should round-trip through the federation layer your institution uses (OpenAIRE Guidelines 4.0 for European federation, DataCite Commons for DOI-anchored discovery, Crossref for article-anchored discovery) without upstream errors. Third, walk a real-world record through the sample-workflow path on this page and confirm the structured fields capture what the prose describes.
- Where do I report errors in the checklist?
- Open a comment via the dictionary-feedback flow at /dictionary/contribute. Editorial corrections — wrong vendor module names, deprecated standards, broken integration paths — are queued into the next release cycle. Substantive disagreements on the operational guidance are routed to the working group for review and may motivate a checklist revision.
- Is this checklist enough to certify my implementation?
- No. The checklist gives you the operational baseline; certification against federation profiles (CoreTrustSeal, OpenAIRE-compliant, COAR-aligned) is a separate process with its own audit. Treat the checklist as the engineering scaffolding and the certification as the institutional sign-off that the scaffolding is being used.
