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Joint Research Management Office

Barts Health account management

The JRMO offers a comprehensive range of financial services. This page contains guidance on how we can help you set up an account, ensure that expenditure against your account is dealt with efficiently, provide you with budget information, and close down completed grants.

Setting up an account

Once the JRMO has received your grant approval letter or, in the case of clinical trials, the final signed clinical trials agreement, the finance team will set up a budget code for each area of expenditure. This expenditure can be in the form of staff, equipment, consumables or Trust service costs and, in the case of clinical trials, it can be all of these.

The setting up process takes around 48 hours and the JRMO will inform you of the relevant codes and budget headings (known as the Announcement) once this process is complete.

The JRMO team will invoice your project’s funder on a periodic basis, as agreed in the grant letter of approval or clinical trials agreement.

Directly-employed staff

If your project has a member of staff directly charged to its budget, then that member of staff will be paid from the budget lines. It must be noted that your allotted budget will only cover the basic salary.

On no account must the staff member in question be paid overtime or unsocial hours without the prior agreement of the JRMO.

Travel expenses

Barts Health employees will be reimbursed at the most economical rate of travel, regardless of the class travelled - for example, first-class travel will be reimbursed at the standard rate - and the standard rate is what must be claimed on the expense claim form. Only in exceptional circumstances, agreed in advance, will this change.

Purchasing goods and service

The purchase of goods and services required by the Trust falls outside the employee expenses policy and therefore must be claimed through the Trust procurement process - not through the expenses claim process.

A purchase order must first be raised before the goods and services are provided to the Trust, and all invoices must be sent to the Trust for payment directly to the supplier. Where the supplier only accepts payment by credit card, a purchase order must first be raised before payment is made using a Trust credit card held by the procurement department. Please contact the procurement department for further guidance on this process: barts.procurement@nhs.net 

The full Trust policy can be found on WeShare (click on the 'Expenses Services' section).

Where Barts Health is the trial sponsor purchases must use the relevant budget code from the announcement sent to you by the JRMO. The Procurement and e-commerce team exists to help make the procurement process as smooth as possible for you. It has five aims:

  • To secure the best value for money on our non-pay expenditure, and on goods and services that meet our clinical quality standards,
  • To maximise the efficiency and minimise the cost, both within Barts Health and across our supply chain,
  • To work with partners, including other NHS bodies, our existing suppliers and wider organisations,
  • To be a great place to work for our procurement staff,
  • To become a better ‘corporate citizen’ and use our purchasing capability for the benefit of East London.

All equipment and consumables must be purchased via the non-stock requisition order book and through the supplies department (see expenses claims below). For more information and for links to Oracle and other relevant systems please visit WeShare.

Service costs

All service costs for projects will be journaled, not as tests performed, but as pro-rata to income on the project. For example, if CT scans are 10% of the budgeted project cost, then 10% of the total project income will be journaled to imaging.

Patient payments

It is likely that patient payments will have been included in the costs when the contract was negotiated for a project. Please refer to your copy of the relevant clinical trials agreement to see how these costs will be recovered.

Either the project will have a separate budget set up for these reimbursements or, alternatively, the company may reimburse all travel costs on receipt of an invoice, with attached travel receipts.

Budget holder responsibilities

Ultimately, although the JRMO is responsible for budget administration, it is the investigator who is the budget holder for a project. From the initial announcement that is sent out, it is clear how much is available to spend and what it can be spent on. It is the responsibility to ensure that they do not run over budget.

In addition, the investigator must ensure the JRMO is kept up to date on clinical trial recruitment figures, so that the JRMO can invoice the funder at the correct times, with accurate information.

The JRMO will provide the Investigator with regular (quarterly) statements of account relating to projects, although if you wish to receive them at other intervals please feel free to ask.

Project end

Researchers need to ensure that the JRMO is informed once a project has finished. Please be aware that staff may still have some financial milestones to meet before our files can be closed.

Once all of the relevant staff, equipment, consumables or service costs have been paid from the project, any residual money will be journaled to an individual Investigator account or departmental investigator account, to be used to train and facilitate future research within the relevant department.

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