How to claim funds with an advanced payment request

In exceptional circumstances, Wellcome will pay grant funds before money has been spent.  

We will consider paying grants this way when:

• organisations have limited cash flows or income streams, for grants that require very large initial starting costs
• organisations that have limited financial reserves to use
• the grant is for emergency funding

Wellcome determines if your grant will be paid in advance as part of our due diligence checks when making an award. If you think your grant will require advance payments, contact your Wellcome funding manager.

You will need to send a signed letter from the Finance Director at the organisation justifying why advance payments are needed. The letter must include:

• reasons why your organisation and grant award requires advance funding
• supporting evidence for one or more of the qualifying reasons
• confirmation that your organisation is externally audited and the audit opinion resulting from your last audit is unqualified

The organisation approver or spend reporter in your organisation’s workspace on the Wellcome Funding platform can complete and submit the advance payment request online. Existing administrators in your organisation's account can add new team members to the account. Read guidance on setting up and managing an organisation workspace.

You need to provide information about:

• how much you expect to spend over the current three month request period
• how much was actually spent in the previous three month request period

You may be prompted to explain your request. For example, you need to include information if there is an unusually high or low request of funds for the current period.  

The request periods are:

• January-March
• April-June
• July-September
• October-December

Some information about your organisation’s grants will have been automatically added to the advance payment report. If you have any questions about the data that has been automatically added to your report, contact your Wellcome funding manager.

We will review your claim and any explanations you have provided to support it before making payments.

A member of Wellcome's Finance team may contact you to provide additional information to support your claim, such as invoices or transaction listings.

In some scenarios, we may not pay exactly what you have requested. For example, if you have funds remaining from your payment in the previous request period, we will factor this in when working out how much to pay for the current period.

To avoid delays in receiving your payment, make sure you give a clear explanation to support your request when required.

If you normally submit an Excel spend report to the Commercial Finance inbox (commercialfinance@wellcome.org) for payment review, you will no longer need to email your Excel spend report to this email address. Instead, you will be required to submit your payment request each quarter online. You should still maintain and use the Excel spend report for your reporting and tracking of the grant expenditure, as we may ask to review this separately.

You will be able to submit your online payment request from the date of when your next spend report payment is due. This may vary on a grant-by-grant basis. The request form will appear in your Wellcome Funding organisation workspace.

You will receive an email from the Commercial Finance team at Wellcome detailing what specific awards this change applies to.

How to complete your first online advance payment report

When you fill in 'Spend Last Period' for the first time in the online request form, enter the total amount you’ve spent on the grant so far, up to the end of the last quarter’s claim period date. This will make sure the system calculates your ‘remaining funds after spend last period’ correctly and processes the right payment to you.