Horizon Europe – Understanding the link between the work plan, reporting periods, and payments schedule

The Horizon Europe program funds multi-annum consortium-based projects, typically research projects. The funding is essentially public funding, and as such projects funded under this program are subject to scrutiny. The program funding mechanism consists of several layers and building blocks. There is the work plan, which includes objectives, work packages, deliverables, and milestones. Then there are reporting periods and the associated payments schedule set by the EC for your project. How do these building blocks link and what are the relations between them? This article is here to explain all that. To do that, we should break the process into elements, explain them individually, and then tie them all back together to get the full picture.