Consultancy Request Form

Consultancy: Consultants provide knowledge and expertise to support a business need. For example, Professor A may sit on a scientific advisory board, review and provide comment on a written document or present on their specialist topic to an internal business meeting.

Fee for Service: Researchers can agree to undertake a fee for service contract where a specific piece of lab work needs to be undertaken. For example, Professor A may agree to test the sensitivity of a new in vitro diagnostic text within their lab. This may include staff time for multiple members of staff as well as facility and consumable costs.

Differences in Costing:
Consultancy can only include staff time, travel and subsistence. 
Fee for Service contracts will also include facility, equipment and consumable costs.

Consultancy can be further categorised in 3 ways, depending on who manages the consultancy:

Private Consultancy: the PI acts as Contractor and enters directly into an agreement with a Client to provide Consulting Services in a private capacity, with the SGUL member of staff providing their expertise on a matter not related to SGUL-owned materials or facilities. Private Consultancy is not organised through or under the control of SGUL and important restrictions apply. There is no relationship between SGUL and the Client regarding the work being undertaken and the Consultant must make sure that any Client is aware of this. The Consultant must take out the necessary insurance to protect their liability.

Personal SGUL-Managed Consultancy: here SGUL acts as Contractor and enters into an agreement with a Client on behalf of the SGUL member of staff. As opposed to Private St George’s Consultancy, there is a direct relationship between SGUL and the Client regarding the Consulting Services being delivered by the SGUL member of staff and SGUL provides professional insurance cover for such services.

Institutional Consultancy: here SGUL acts as Contractor and enters into an agreement with a Client to provide Consulting Services undertaken by an individual academic, or other SGUL members of staff (including technicians and professional services staff), or a team of collaborators on behalf of SGUL. The contract is often related to SGUL’s materials or facilities. Such consultancy will be undertaken within the terms of the SGUL member of staff’s employment contract. SGUL members of staff involved are expected to be working flexibly and supportive in the interests of SGUL and their own professional development. There is a direct relationship between SGUL and the Client regarding the work being undertaken and SGUL provides professional insurance cover.

Any service which supports a business need and relies on your academic experience and expertise to succeed. Consultants are providing the service as a representative of SGUL and may not take on additional business-related titles as part of the consultancy.  

It is important that we receive a detailed description of the services you are providing, in order to be as accurate as possible in the contract and to be clear in the invoices what the payment refers to.

We would appreciate details such as what type of event you are contributing to (advisory board meeting, presentation etc) and what the knowledge know-how you are providing is. If the consultancy will last over a period of time, it would be helpful to receive details regarding what you would be doing for each consultancy session, number of hours it will take, and when these sessions would be.

This depends on how long the consultancy agreement is due to last and the preference of the company who is paying for the consultancy.

If the consultancy is due to last one day, where you will be contribution is complete after one consultancy session, payment can easily be executed in one invoice.

If the consultancy is due to last a period of months, and you will be contributing to multiple sessions on multiple occasions, it is likely the company will prefer to invoice after each session as it is a more manageable way of paying rather than in lump sums. 

The university has a consultancy policy in place, which can be found on the SGUL website here: Consultancy Policy (sgul.ac.uk). In the policy, it states that “SGUL permits in total 30 days of consultancy activity for eligible full-time SGUL members of staff (pro rata for eligible part-time SGUL member of staff) through defined Consultancy Arrangements in any 12 month period”.

If you are close to reaching your 30-day limit, it is essential that you inform Enterprise & Innovation, as well as your Institute Director, again as per SGUL’s consultancy policy.

It is not your responsibility to cost up your Consultancy work – this is the responsibility of the Enterprise and Innovation team. Please do not agree to any hourly rates with companies without consulting the E&I team. This is to ensure that you are being paid in line with your salary and in line with your level of expertise and experience.

Furthermore, we have to ensure that your hourly rate incorporates the appropriate ‘commercial markup’ to accommodate overheads and admin fees that facilitate your consultancy work to take place.

‘Commercial Markup’ is the additional fees added on to your consultancy rate to offset the costs on the university that enable the consultancy work to take place.

The fee is accurately calculated by the E&I team as a separate entity and does not come out of the Consultant’s rate.

The Commercial Markup consists of overhead fees for the Institutes and Admin Fees for the administration to set up the Consultancy. 

Some companies have a start date in mind for the consultancy work to align with their business plans. Other companies may want you to start as soon as possible.

In order to complete all the necessary administrative work with creating a contract for the consultancy work across the teams, we require a minimum of 2 working weeks to allow for processing, negotiations and signatures to take place.

If the E&I team and contracts do not have the request 2 weeks to process the consultancy request, we cannot guarantee that we can finalise it by the date requested.  

The first step to starting the consultancy agreement is to complete the consultancy request form, available on the SGUL website (Agreement (inteum.com)). This will provide E&I with all the necessary information to then be collated and passed on to the contracts team for drafting.

There may be some follow up correspondence to establish your hourly rate, subject to whether one has already been established for you recently.

All the information that Enterprise require is stipulated on the webform. This includes details surrounding the duration of the consultancy, the services which are to be provided and remuneration for your services.

The webform is directly linked to the portal so that all the necessary details can be populated for E&I and contracts on one server. While you do have the onus to upload information correctly, please rest assured that a member of the E&I team will approve that everything is correct. If something is not quite right, we will simply push back the form to you to correct what’s necessary.

The number of instalments refers to the amounts of sessions you will spend completing the consultancy services. Majority of the time, if you are attending an AdBoard meeting or delivering a presentation, this will only be one instalment, as the consultancy services are completed in one day. If the consultancy agreement lasts for several months, it is more likely that they will require your expertise on several occasions. It is important we know how many instalments you anticipate, so that we have an insight into how many invoices we should raise.

We strongly advise that the Consultancy Contract would always be between the Company and the University. Your name would not appear as a party on the contract. This is to ensure that you are not legally liable and are covered under the University insurance.

If you were to have a Private Consultancy Contract in place, the contract would be between the Consultant and the Company, however no liability insurance would be in place and SGUL would not be involved in the Consultancy.

No, please do not use your own signature. In cases where you sign a contract, you won’t be able to benefit from St George’s insurance and legal protection and the contract and income will not be processed by JRES (It would become a Private Consultancy). Any consultancy contract needs to be signed by an authorised signatory of St George’s.

You may be asked to sign that you have “read and understood” the agreement. This does not make you liable under the agreement. 

The Company is only obliged to pay for the hours you are contracted. If you think you would require more hours to finish work, please liaise with the Enterprise team and the Company and we can look into a contract amendment to include more hours.

Yes. The work you are contracted for would be outlined in the contract. If the Company requires work that is not covered by the contract, we will require a new contract. However, if the Company is happy to reuse the previous contract as a template, we can fast track the contract sign.

The distribution of Consultancy funds occurs after the financial handover received from the Contracts Team. The Contracts Team handover details to us (and to you, for your information) such as how to total fee will be split between payment to the PI, overheads and administrative fees.

• Repayment of SGUL commercial mark up (overheads and administrative fees)
• Payment of remaining revenue to the SGUL member of staff (see details below).

Further on this point:

While Private Consultancy does not generate any SGUL income, Personal SGUL-Managed Consultancy will generate overheads which will be distributed to the respective institute or department.

Any income generated from Institutional Consultancy will be applied to recover full economic costs incurred by SGUL.

In general, SGUL institutes and departments are encouraged to recognise the contribution made by members of staff engaging in Personal SGUL-Managed Consultancy or Institutional Consultancy activities in their allocation of resources.

In case of a significantly high consultancy contract the Executive Committee reserves the right to decide that administration fee or parts thereof to be kept centrally in SGUL.

After successful delivery of the Consulting Service or, in the cases of longer term Consultancy Arrangements in regular instalments (e.g. monthly or quarterly), the Consultant should hand in a time sheet via email to the Head of Enterprise & Innovation (abatra@sgul.ac.uk) who will sign off the time sheet and forward to Finance for invoicing purposes.

The consultancy income for the SGUL member of staff can then either be directly paid to the individual or to the individual’s business via payroll as one-off payment, which will be subject to appropriate national insurance and income tax deductions, or it can be transferred to an SGUL departmental/institutional project code on completion of a fee waiver form.

The consultancy work will be paid in the next payday after Payroll received the Enterprise approved timesheet, and Finance arrange the subsequent distribution. 

The payment will be in the next month’s payroll, so long as Payroll receive the timesheet and invoice from Finance before the payroll cut-off date for that month.

The invoicing for the related consultancy work must have been completed in order for Finance to approve the timesheet.  

An approved timesheet is required for a payment to be made to a SGUL member of staff via payroll or where the contract requires the fee be calculated based on an hourly rate. 

A C1 sub-project code is used for Consultancy only.

A G Non-Pay sub-project code sits within the core funds of a Research Institute and can be used for appropriate expenses outside of a specific consultancy.  

Expenses specifically related to a Consultancy (such as travel to a consultancy) should be charged to the C1 sub-project code.

Expenses not specifically related to a Consultancy should be charged to the G Non Pay sub-project code.

This is important for tax purposes.