Finance System

The Catapult centres are a network of world-leading centres designed to transform the UK’s capability for innovation in specific areas and help drive future economic growth. (https://catapult.org.uk/catapult-centres/).

Funded by Innovate UK, an agency of the UK government, Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) is a government-funded, not-for-profit organisation whose primary goal is in helping the life science community push the boundaries of the drug discovery business by industrialising and driving the adoption of new tools and technologies for the sector. New industrialised technologies are vital for delivering new medicines to patients, faster.

Therefore, we provide unique scientific capabilities, and act as a gateway to UK resources and expertise, supporting UK SMEs to drive the development and industrialisation of innovative approaches for the discovery of new medicines. By validating new ways of discovering medicines and driving key talent and expertise across the sector, we support the UK life sciences industry, SMEs, and innovators to deliver growth for the UK economy and maintain the UK’s heritage position as a global leader in medicines R&D.

As detailed above we provide scientific capabilities to support our sector through the use of Innovate funding to research innovative new capabilities of the delivery of fee for service commercial contracts. Our delivery is structured and tracked as projects and require us to be able to capture direct and indirect costs on a project-by-project basis to support invoicing. Whilst all contracts are managed via projects MDC has multiple different contract types which have significantly different invoicing and reporting requirements, examples of invoicing types range from Innovate UK which requires detailed reporting of all claimed items to commercial contracts that run on milestone completion and/or defined periodic invoicing.