Overview of the Proposal forms step

This step is the core of the submission process. Click on the submission wizard if you just created the draft proposal, or, to access a previously saved draft proposal form, take following steps:
In the Funding & Tenders Portal, click on the Actions button next to the proposal and select Edit Draft:

Your proposal will open showing the Proposal forms screen:
When clicking the Edit forms button, the administrative form (Part A) opens.

The action buttons of the wizard

The main action buttons shown in the Proposal forms screen of the submission wizard are:

Familiarising yourself with the wizard and the form

Click the button in the Administrative forms section to read the help instructions for editing the administrative forms of the proposal, as shown in the picture below:

Click to start editing the forms. You can check Submission system for further information about the compatibility recommendations to work with the form.

What you need to know about completing the form

Who can fill in the form?

Any contact with full access from the coordinator organisation can submit the proposal, and can also modify the whole form Part A on behalf of the rest of participants. The rest of participants can preview the form and the main contact/contacts with full access can edit the contact details information of their organisation and the line in the budget table corresponding to their own organisation.

Click the button to access the forms.

Read-only fields

The list of participants and contact persons, the Participant Identification Code (PIC) and the respective summary data of the participants (shown in blue in the form) are read-only fields. To modify the list of participants or contact persons, please go back to the Participants step. To modify the legal data of the organisation, please read more about it in this Data Updates section.

Guidance in the form

If you click on the question marks in blue, you can read more information about the sections.
Each box of the form contains a short text with guidance on the format, the length and required information. Guidance for the fields displays when you bring your cursor over the boxes. Once you click on the text or start editing the information, it disappears automatically.

Navigation in the form

To view the different sections, you may either use the navigation in the header of the form or click on the Show buttons in the table of contents (cover page).

Validation

The form has built in checks and gives error or warning messages in case fields are not completed.

Please click the button to check your data. Errors and warnings will be listed at the end of the form. Error fields will be highlighted in red, whereas warnings will be highlighted in yellow.

Errors mean that mandatory information is missing (such as the Proposal Title). The proposal cannot be submitted until these errors are corrected.

Warning messages do not block submission, but they indicate missing information that may be important for the proposal. Ideally, these warning messages should be addressed by correcting the information provided.

By clicking on the Show button, you can easily get back to the respective fields to correct them. See Validating, saving and closing the form for more details.

Saving the data

Clicking the button saves your input at any moment. Please note that no data is actually saved until you perform the saving action. You can continue editing after clicking on Save.

Before closing the form, click the button. It just saves the data and closes the form for further editing later on, but it does not mean that the proposal is submitted yet. This will take you back to Proposal forms, where you can upload the technical annex and any additional documents. You may return to edit the form as many times as you wish before the closing date of the call. However, remember that any changes saved in the form need to be resubmitted, if you already submitted the form once.

Please note, the eForm allows you to go back to Proposal forms in the submission wizard by either clicking the Proposal forms button in the cover page of the proposal (backwards button) or the Proposal forms button of the validation results page (forward button). In any of the two cases, leaving the form using these buttons does not save your changes, so please make sure to save the form first:

Action buttons within the form

The action buttons in the form help you find and verify the information easily. Two of them correspond to saving actions, as explained above, the other one checks for errors in the form:

Editing and completing the form

When clicking the button in the submission wizard, Proposal forms screen; the form opens in the first page within your browser. This first page includes the table of contents and the Call information. You can return to this screen by clicking the button at any moment, to be able to navigate to any of the sections in the form by clicking the Show button in the Table of contents:

To start completing the form, use the navigation buttons on the banner in order to advance through the different sections:

Then, fill in the corresponding fields for each section:

When filling the form, if you need a clarification about a section you can click on the question mark buttons to get a text explaining about what to provide for that field/section:

In order to provide the basic information of the Department carrying out the proposed work, click on Show the Participants section, then on Participant’s details and scroll down to page 2:

There, you can also select the Same as proposing organisation’s address or the Not applicable checkboxes, as well as adding a Department by clicking on Add a Department.

Validating, saving and closing the form

You can click the button to make sure that your proposal form is correct and complete. Validating the form must be done before being able to submit. If you do not run it via the Validate Form button, when you finish filling the form you will automatically arrive to the validation step, as the last step in completing the form.

Note: For the calls with multiple participants, every participant's page needs to be visited at least once to be able to validate the section. Otherwise, you will receive a blocking error: "This section has not been validated yet".

You will be presented with any errors/warnings. Validate your results by reviewing the indicated errors/warnings. Click on the Show Error / Show Warning buttons to go to the affected parts:

The error/warning will be highlighted for you in the form. Amend contents accordingly. Any errors must be corrected in order to be able to submit your proposal. Warnings will not prevent you from submitting.

If the errors/warnings are related to missing data for the participating organisations or main contacts in the consortium, the Show Error / Show Warning buttons will take to the part in the form where you find those problems, but to fix this specific issues you need to Save and close the form and go back to the Participants screen. After any change in the consortium, you need to edit and re-validate the form.

When all issues are fixed, click the button. Your form has now been saved on the Commission servers, but your proposal is not yet submitted.

Part B - Downloading and completing the annex forms

Click on to download all the proposal templates, which will be different from call to call.

The template describes the information that must be included in your application and how to structure that information. You will need to complete this package as thoroughly as possible. You can receive assistance from the contacts listed in the Get Support section on the topic page from the Funding & Tenders Portal. It is important that you remain within the file size and page limits that a proposal may have. Once you have completed your proposal based on the downloaded template, you must convert it into a PDF file, which you will then upload as an Annex form of the proposal. This is referred to as Part B of your proposal.

In the Part B and Annexes section, you will see a small coloured vertical line at the left side of the different fields to upload documents: if this line is green, it means that the field is completed successfully and, if the line is red, it means the field is incomplete.

Part B - Uploading the annex forms

When you complete the annex forms, you must prepare them for uploading. Only the coordinator organisation of the proposal can upload files in Part B. All annexes must be in PDF format, except if a different format is specifically mentioned in the attachment info (under File type). The file name cannot contain other than Latin characters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), dot (.), dash (-), underscore (_) and spaces.

A number of limitations and requirements are in place for each of the forms, depending on the call – such as, page size and page limit, document size limit, etc.

The breach of certain limitations, such as document size limits, could result in failure to upload. As a result, you may need to amend the documents and upload them again. If you exceed the page number limit, when applicable, you will be still able to upload the document but all of the excess pages will contain just a watermark as content.

You will also see the following warning, informing that the content of those water marked pages will be dismissed during the evaluation session:

In the process of completing your annex forms, and prior to uploading them, make sure that your documents comply with the mentioned requirements and recommendations, as generally outlined below:

1. PDF conversion issues and checks:
   • Before you start the conversion to PDF, clean up your document - accept all tracked changes, delete internal review notes or comments, check for any formatting issues, and so on. The document to be converted into PDF must only contain the final, "clean" content.
   • Check that your PDF conversion software has successfully converted all the pages of your original document (e.g. check for any problems with page limits, tables, graphics or footnotes).
   • Check that your PDF conversion software has not cut down pages with landscape orientation to fit them into portrait orientation format.
   • Check that captions and labels have not been lost from your diagrams.
   • Embed all fonts in the PDF file (math symbols, non-Latin alphabet text, etc.).
2. Limitations in document page number, font size, and page margins: each form template, depending on the specific call, may impose certain limitations in the document formatting with regard to the maximum number of pages in the document, the minimum/maximum font size allowed, and/or the minimum margins you must allow for the page layout.
   

   Always make sure to check and apply the guidance for the specific call, available on the Funding & Tenders Portal, as well as the instructions at the beginning of the annex form templates for each specific call.

   If you attempt to upload an annex form that contains more pages than the specified limit, you will not be blocked by the system. However, after the upload, the system will display a warning message, advising you to shorten and re-upload the proposal.

   If the number of pages in one of the uploaded documents still exceeds the allowed limit and the deadline has not yet expired, you will see an Eligibility Warning advising you to shorten and re-upload the file.

3. Document files size: the allowed file size of annex forms may be limited, too. Check the guidance documentation available in the Topic page information package on the Funding & Tenders Portal.
   

   When the document file size exceeds the allowed limit, the file will not be uploaded and the system will display an error message immediately during the upload process, as shown in the picture below:
   

4. Graphical resolution: use a maximum resolution of 300 dpi for all graphics and text (photocopy quality). This can considerably reduce the PDF file size.
5. Documents file name and security:
   
   • Ensure that the annex forms file names contain alphanumerical characters only (A-Z, a-z, 0-9). Dot (.), dash (-), underscore (_) and spaces are allowed in the file name.
   • Do not protect the uploaded files with a password.
   • Make sure that the uploaded files are not electronically signed nor encrypted.
6. Post-upload verification: once you upload your files, check their quality - download them to check whether the file transfer was successful and if the file is complete. If not, make the necessary corrections and upload again.

Once the downloaded templates have been completed and are ready to upload, follow these steps to upload them:

1. Click the button for the respective document in Proposal forms of the submission wizard:
   

   

   Note

   The number of annexes shown in the image above is specific to the example used to capture images, the actual list of necessary annexes requested in the submission system is different from topic to topic.

2. Select the file to upload from the Open window. If your file has blank spaces in its name, the system will upload it filing the blank spaces with "_".
   

   
   

3. Click on .
4. Optionally, you can click on an uploaded file to remove it and replace it with a new file.

Part C

Depending on the type of call, filling in an additional form will be required: Part C. This web form can be found in the wizard as shown below:

After clicking on the Edit Part C button, the web form will open:

When you have completed it, click on the Save data button.

MEDIA DB

For some calls (i.e. CREA), you may be required to provide additional information about media works which are part of the application. In these cases, you will see an additional Edit MEDIA DB button, which will lead you to an online form where you can enter all the required information about the media works considered in the application.

Click on it. The page Creative Europe MEDIA database opens. Follow the specific application instructions provided in the form itself (the sections and the instructions in the form will be different from call to call).

When you have completed the form, click the Download as PDF button to download the PDF file that you need to upload as an annex to your proposal.

Then, go back to the Submission system (Proposal Forms step). Scroll down to the Part B and annexes section, locate the entry for the MEDIA DB information and upload the PDF file:

GIS data

For some calls (i.e. CEF), you may be required to provide information about  the location of your proposal. In these cases, you will see an additional Edit GIS data button. GIS stands for Geographical Information System and you can find the instructions on how to use it here.

Clicking the Edit GIS data button will lead you to the tool.

Acccess to the Part C, MEDIA DB and GIS data forms

Validate and submit your proposal

To make sure that your application meets the requirements run a validation of your draft proposal. To do so, you click on the button at the bottom of the submission application. In order to make your application meet the requirements of partners, file sizes, number of pages, etc., you will be prompted to correct any errors that have been detected in the forms. Any errors will be displayed as indicated below:

Please note that this action is not exactly the same as clicking on Validate form within the form. When you run a validation from within the form, the validation checks only the content of the form, i.e. the administrative form in Part A.

When you run a validation from the submission application via Validate, you run a validation of your whole draft proposal. This includes all fields in Part A, the uploaded files under Part B and Annexes and the presence of a saved Part C (if available for the call).

The following screen shows the results of validating the whole draft proposal:

You have links for the errors and warnings. Clicking on them will expand the details for the error with new links. By clicking on these new links, you will access the affected parts in the form.

You are advised to run both validations in different moments. When filling in the form, use the Validate form functionality within the form. Before submitting your proposal, run a validation from the submission application to check if your application is ready to be sent by clicking on the action button Validate.

Part of the validation can include reviewing previous steps, such as the Participants screen, or they can be related to the Part B annexes, and not only the form Part A.

When the issue is that the consortium has been modified after having edited the form Part A, you will get the following message. Click Edit Form, review the participants section and click on Save and Close. Then click on Validate again, back in the Proposal Forms screen.

If only warnings are found, and not blocking errors, you may submit any way. You will have the opportunity to enter a justification for the remaining warnings:

The Submitted status will also be shown on the My Proposal(s) page of the Funding & Tenders Portal. The Proposal Coordinator will also receive a submission confirmation e-mail, including details about the submitted proposal. Note that the e-mail could end up in the spam folder or get blocked by the anti-spam software of your organisation, so make sure that you check your inbox regularly.

The submission is completed when the Proposal Coordinator clicks on , and the confirmation email has been received. Uploading the Annex documents only, does not finalise the submission process.

It is highly recommended to submit your proposal as early as possible and at least 48 hours prior to the call deadline. This will avoid being confronted with incompatible local IT configuration settings shortly before the call deadline, when insufficient time would be left to handle it. There is no reason in delaying the submission for confidentiality concerns as the system does not allow any access to the proposals before call deadline or cut-off (other than to selected data that is part of the Terms and Conditions for the Submission of Applications). You can submit the proposal as many times as you wish up to the deadline. Every submitted version will replace the previously submitted one.