A Guide to Roles in the Funding & Tenders Portal

Once your project has been selected for funding, you start navigating a series of requirements and administrative steps on the way to finally starting the project. Among these steps, the signing of the Declaration of Honour and the Grant Agreement stand out as crucial moments. However, when the time comes, one key question presents itself: who should sign?

Setting the Stage: Initial Role Allocation

Let’s take a step back. Once the EC selects your project, one of the first actions you should take is to allocate roles on the Funding and Tenders (F&T) Portal, meaning to assign permissions and functions to specific persons within your organisation.

This is an essential and mandatory procedure that allows you not only to complete the Grant Agreement preparation, but also to manage all the administrative requirements during the whole project lifetime.

Who’s Who: A Breakdown of Roles

The European Commission has established different types of roles, classified into two categories:  Organisational roles and Project roles.

• Roles at the organisational level define who represents the organisation in the portal. These roles are assigned to the whole company and are not tied to any single project.
• Roles at the project level define who can perform the different project- related tasks. These persons are specific to each grant and may differ between projects within the same organisation.

Among the organisational roles are:

• Self-registrant: a temporary role automatically assigned to the person who initially registers the organization on the F&T Portal. This role expires once the LEAR is validated.
• LEAR (Legal Entity Appointed Representative): The core mandatory role. Manages all the legal and administrative data for the organization and nominates other key roles.
• Account Administrator: Nominated by the LEAR to help manage organizational data and assign other roles.
• LSIGN and FSIGN (Legal and Financial Signatory): individuals authorized to digitally sign legal or financial documents on behalf of the organization.

While at the project level we find:

• PCoCo (Primary Coordinator Contact), CoCo, PaCo (Coordinator and Participant Contacts, respectively): main contacts for the full project, with the full rights to submit documentations and modify data during the entire project duration.
• PLSIGN and PFSIGN (Project Legal and Financial Signatory): persons who will actually sign the project related documents, selected from the organization’s pool of authorized signatories (LSIGN and FSIGN).
• Task Manager & Team Member: persons involved in the project but with limited access and right on the EC portal.

The long list of acronyms can be intimidating, but no need to worry, these are functions, not necessarily different people. In fact, a single team member can hold most of these roles at once.

Finalizing the Setup

Remember: assigning roles promptly on the F&T portal is essential to complete the required administrative and legal steps and ensure a timely start to your project.

To learn more about specific roles and how to set them up, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll be happy to support you and your team in getting fully prepared to start your project: [email protected]