All proposals at UT route through UTRMS, the proposal submission software.  Due to the intricacies of this software, it is necessary to submit all proposals 7 business days (56 hours) before the due date.  Proposals submitted less than 7 working days, in advance, run the risk of not being processed by the due date. Weekends and holidays do not count towards your 7 working/business days.

If you are eligible for Principal Investigatory (PI) status, you are highly encouraged to engage with the research proposal process. This means you will generate a research proposal document, a budget, a budget narrative, and any additional documentation outlined in the Request for Proposal (RFP). Please work with the CSR Contracts and Grants team at projectsupport@csr.utexas.edu to ensure compliance with all of these materials.

To begin the process, you must first have both a budget and a budget narrative regardless of the other items required in the RFP. The University’s Office of Sponsored Projects (OSP) requires them both for internal compliance checks and documentation. Budgets can span anywhere from a few months to several years.

Please reach out to projectsupport@csr.utexas.edu to begin the budget drafting process. The Contracts and Grants, Pre-Award admin will create the initial draft budget based on the information provided to them. The following bullet points are required to start the proposal process:

• A due date for the proposal
• A copy of the RFP or a link where the instructions/guidelines can be downloaded
• Period of Performance, sometimes referred to as the PoP
• All team members, either named or a corresponding job title
  • How many person-months to budget for them in each year;
  • If any Graduate Research Assistants (GRA) are proposed: will they be a full-time or appointed to the project at a lower rate. This effects how much tuition will be charged to the project.
    • Whether the GRA(s) be paid using the standard ASE or CSR rates. Unless otherwise instructed, it is assumed that all proposals routed through CSR will use the center’s rates.
• Any prospective travel, both foreign and domestic
• If you would like a normative amount budgeted in materials and supplies and/or publication costs
  • Please note, publication costs are their own line item and are not to be budgeted with materials and supplies.
• Any potential equipment purchases and a rough dollar estimate

Some proposals are considered two-step processes. The first step may not require any budgetary information or signature by an authorized representative. If this is the case, then you may submit at your own leisure. If you have any questions, then please filter all questions through to the Contracts and Grants, Pre-Award admin. All other proposals must route through OSP.

Submission

Once the budget and narrative are considered finalized, they cannot be changed after you have given clearance to submit to OSP for review. Any changes to the proposal, including title changes, changing appointments, adding/removing team members causes routing issues/delays once the proposal has been routed out of the office.

Internal submission through UTRMS

UT Research Management Suite (UTRMS) is the system through which all Funding Proposals (FP) are routed for review, compliance checks, and eventual submission to the sponsor are routed from CSR to OSP. UTRMS does not allow for changes after the fact, so the budgetary materials need to be in FINAL form before they can be submitted for review.

OSP only requires the finalized budget, narrative, and a copy of the RFP to begin their review process.

External submission

The RFP will detail how the proposal will be submitted to the sponsor. For example, if your sponsor is NASA, then it is typically submitted through NSPIRES. Please ensure that you have added the Contracts and Grants, Pre-Award admin as a support staff member in the proposal and that your corresponding organization is the University of Texas at Austin.

Should the proposal state that the documents must be submitted through grants.gov, then that is what is known as a System-to-System submission. This means that UTRMS will be the system we generate the proposal within and OSP will submit it through. This is why all documentation needs to be in its final state before submission. Data entry is sometimes doubled or tripled within UTRMS which causes edits throughout the document if any changes are made after submission to OSP.

All proposal components are either completed through data entry in the system or submitted as separate PDF documents. Please do not provide one proposal document with all components as the Contracts and Grants, Pre-Award admin will then have to separate out each individual portion for upload.

Disclosure Requirements

As a PI, you are required to fill out the following types of disclosures:

• Foreign Influence
• Financial Conflict of Interest (FCOI)