NEF, FORCE - two tools with very similar applications. The finance help desk recently published a comparison of these tools in their newsletter.

Both of these tools are accessed through the Participant Portal. NEF stands for "Negotiation Facility" (however, in fact, it covers Negotiation, Amendments and Periodic Reports). FORCE stands for "Form C editor" and is used for Periodic Reports.

It depends on which unit your project is with as to which tool is used to produce your Financial Reports. From the user's point of view, this choice is academic, as the correct tool will appear automatically from the project link in your participant's portal.

Here a summary of the NEF and FORCE usage:

- Negotiations: NEF is for all FP7 projects used to generate the Grant Preparation Form (GPF) and to access the legal information of partners involved in negotiated proposals such as contact persons, budget, bank account, and Description of Work
- Amendments: NEF is for all FP7 projects used to collect the information required to implement an amendment (mainly to implement budget restructuring)
- Periodic reporting: NEF is used to collect periodic reports such as cost declarations for a financial period in projects administered by DG INFSO, DG MOOV, and DG ENER. DG RTD uses FORCE for Periodic Reporting.

Please note that Firefox 3.x is not supported for both tools.