Every Horizon Europe project commits to a list of deliverables in its Grant Agreement. Each one has an owner, a type and a due month. In a consortium of ten or more partners, keeping track of them all is one of the coordinator’s most constant tasks, and a late deliverable can hold up the next payment.
What a deliverable is
The Annotated Grant Agreement defines deliverables as “additional outputs that must be produced at a given moment during the action and submitted to the granting authority”. They are listed in Annex 1, the description of the action, with a lead partner and a due date for each one.
Deliverables are easy to confuse with two other things the project reports:
- Milestones are control points that show progress, such as a kick-off meeting, a first prototype or a survey draft. A milestone may coincide with a key deliverable, but it is not submitted as a document in its own right.
- Periodic reports are the technical and financial reports submitted after each reporting period to request a payment. They are separate from deliverables, even though they draw on them.
Types of deliverable
Each deliverable in Annex 1 is labelled with a type code:
Dissemination levels
Each deliverable also has a dissemination level, which sets who can see it:
- Public (PU): fully open, for example published on the project website.
- Sensitive (SEN): access limited under the conditions of the Grant Agreement.
- EU classified: EU-R (Restricted), EU-C (Confidential) and EU-S (Secret), under Commission Decision 2015/444. These apply only to projects handling classified information.
Check the level before you publish anything. Publishing a sensitive deliverable openly can put the consortium in breach of its confidentiality obligations.
Deadlines and how deliverables are submitted
Due dates in Annex 1 are expressed in project months, counted from the project start date. A deliverable due in M6 is due at the end of the sixth month of the project.
Submission works as follows:
- The lead partner prepares the deliverable, with contributions from the other partners involved. Under Article 7, every beneficiary must send its contribution to the coordinator in good time.
- The coordinator reviews it and submits it through the Continuous Reporting tool on the EU Funding & Tenders Portal. The schedule and any templates are on the Deliverables screen of the Portal.
- The granting authority reviews it as part of monitoring the project.
Periods expressed in days are counted in calendar days, not working days (Article 38).
Most coordinatH2: Deadlines and how deliverables are submittedors set internal deadlines a few weeks before the contractual date. That leaves time to collect partner contributions, review quality and fix gaps before submission.
What happens if a deliverable is late or incomplete
The consequences of a late or incomplete deliverable depend on what it affects next:
- Payments can be delayed. The periodic report that requests each payment includes an overview of the work done. If the report is incomplete or the granting authority needs more information, it can suspend the payment deadline until the gaps are fixed (Article 29).
- The grant can be reduced. Beneficiaries must implement the action properly (Article 11). If work is not delivered or does not meet the expected quality, the granting authority may reduce the grant (Article 28) or apply other measures set out in Chapter 5 of the Grant Agreement.
- In lump sum projects, completion is what gets paid. Payments depend on completing work packages, and deliverables are a central part of showing that a work package is complete. See our guide to lump sum projects in Horizon Europe.
What to do if a deliverable will be late
- Tell the granting authority early. Every beneficiary must inform the granting authority immediately of events likely to delay the action (Articles 7 and 19). In practice, the coordinator contacts the project officer.
- Explain the cause and give a new date. A short, concrete explanation is easier to accept than a missed date discovered later.
- Check whether Annex 1 needs to change. If the delay changes the schedule set out in Annex 1, an amendment may be required (Article 39).
How Kronis PMO helps coordinators track deliverables
Most delays start long before the due date: a partner did not know they owned a contribution, or the evidence sat in someone’s inbox. Kronis PMO is an operational workspace for multi-partner Horizon Europe consortia, built to keep that from happening:
- Import the Grant Agreement and Kronis PMO structures the project automatically: work packages, deliverables and timeline.
- Assign each deliverable to an owner across consortium partners, with due dates.
- Track progress across the consortium in a shared space, with role-based permissions for every partner.
- Store the documentation for each deliverable in one place, ready for reviews and audits. This matters most in lump sum projects, where you have to show the work was done.
For a worked example, see how a coordinator runs a 12-partner Horizon Europe project with Kronis PMO.
Kronis product
Run consortium and project management for EU-funded projects from one place.
Key takeaways
- Deliverables are listed in Annex 1, each with a type, a dissemination level, a lead partner and a due month.
- The coordinator submits them through the Portal’s Continuous Reporting tool.
- Late or incomplete work can delay payments or lead to a grant reduction, and in lump sum projects it affects whether a work package counts as complete.
- If a deliverable will be late, tell the project officer early and check whether Annex 1 needs an amendment.
From grant searching to managing it: see Kronis at Startup Olé 2026
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