Personenmonat: Forschungszulage Calculation Guide

Why This Article Matters

In practice I regularly see companies with excellent innovation projects lose time unnecessarily – not because of the idea, but because of unclear effort logic. The Personenmonat is a key term here: it connects project work, time tracking, and the eligible costs of the Forschungszulage.

Once you understand how Personenmonate work, you can:

• present innovation effort in a plausible and audit-proof way,
• integrate the Forschungszulage Personenmonat logic cleanly into your project planning,
• avoid typical mistakes that lead to queries or reductions.

What Is a Personenmonat (PM)?

A Personenmonat is a standardised unit of work effort: 1 Personenmonat = the work output of one person over one month (relative to their contractual working time).

Important: it is not about "calendar days" but about attributable effort on the innovation project. If a person only works part-time on the project, only a proportional Personenmonat is counted.

Example:

• Employee A works 50% on the innovation project in a given month → 0.5 Personenmonat
• Employee B works 100% on the project → 1.0 Personenmonat
• Total for the month: 1.5 Personenmonate

Personenmonat vs. Person-Day vs. Hours – What Counts in the Forschungszulage?

For the Forschungszulage, what ultimately matters is eligible personnel costs – but the presentation of effort must be traceable. Companies often use:

• Hours (very precise, but more effort),
• Person-days (a good middle ground),
• Personenmonate (very well suited for planning, controlling, and plausibility).

I particularly recommend Personenmonate when you:

• have multiple roles / teams working on the project,
• plan effort across months / phases,
• need a clear and audit-friendly logic.

How Are Personenmonate and Eligible Personnel Costs Connected?

For the Forschungszulage, personnel costs are in many cases the largest cost block. Personenmonate help assign these costs transparently to the innovation project.

Typical process:

1. Define roles and work packages in the innovation project
2. Plan effort in Personenmonate per phase
3. Support the effort with time tracking / project records
4. Derive and justify personnel costs from these records (audit-proof)

You can find more background on how we set this up in practice at zeitmaker.com.

Common Mistakes with Personenmonate (and How to Avoid Them)

From my advisory practice, these are the classic pitfalls:

• Unclear project delimitation: "Everything the team does" is not automatically innovation effort.
• No consistent logic: Planning in PM, documenting in "approximate hours" without derivation.
• Effort without a link to results: Personenmonate should correspond to work packages, hypotheses, tests, or technical uncertainties.
• Documentation too late: Best practice is to document in parallel with the project – not to "reconstruct" it months later.

Why the Forschungszulage Is So Attractive for Innovation Projects

The Forschungszulage is for many companies one of the most effective ways to offset innovation costs financially – regardless of industry and (in many cases) regardless of whether there is a classic "R&D department".

My goal is that you:

• master the funding-logic language with confidence (e.g. Personenmonat),
• keep the process lean,
• and maximise the chance of a smooth funding process.

If you want to prepare the certification efficiently: the official point of contact for the application is bescheinigung-forschungszulage.de (official platform). Further guidance and practical guides are available at zeitmaker.com.

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