Within not-for-profit organizations and some government agencies, managing grants is a crucial but often a challenging task. Strict guidelines and regulations, as well as careful tracking of funds, continually place a strain on staff—yet demonstrating accountability to sponsors is critical to obtaining future funding.
Automated grant management lets you keep a closer eye on daily transactions and expenditures and manage grants more efficiently than manual tracking. Timely and accurate reporting helps ensure your organization is meeting the strict regulations inherent to grant sponsorship and makes it easier to demonstrate accountability to your sponsor.
 | Centralize grant information.
Consider the hours spent searching for and filing grant information when you don't have a centralized location for information. Multiple users with varying information can compromise the assurance of data integrity, consistency, and accountability. Gathering and updating scattered information takes valuable administrative time, and jeopardizes the accuracy of your grant information.
Automated grant management can centralize grant information, helping you ensure that it's secure, accessible, and up-to-date for improved transaction control. |
 | Make better decisions.
Automated grant management makes "real-time" details of grant transactions and allocations available any time. Your organization can make faster, more proactive decisions instead of reacting to situations, resulting in better use of grant monies and resources. |
 | Ensure compliance with regulations.
Most grants under a federal program must follow strict guidelines and regulations. Tight expense control, along with the frequent and detailed timely reports required by sponsors, can put a great amount of pressure on an organization. Failure to properly track and report grant monies could jeopardize future funding from the sponsor.
Automated grant management tracks accounting transactions to specific grants and programs, making it possible to allocate costs based on grant and program budgets. By automating workflow, you can ensure compliance with sponsors' guidelines, closely monitor your grant performance, and reduce reconciliation work at month-end or year-end. |
 | Take advantage of advanced reporting capabilites.
The ability to run periodic progress and program progress reports is also an essential need for day-to-day management of grants and projects. With automated grant management, redundant grant administration is a thing of the past. Timely information at your fingertips enables you to manage and redistribute your efforts accordingly.
Sponsors often stipulate within the grant contract what content they want in reports and how often they want reports. With automated grant management, you can monitor daily expenditures and provide reports at any given time to meet strict reporting requirements. The ability to report expenditures in detail and on an ad hoc basis is vital for retaining grant sponsors. |
 | Get accurate financial monitoring.
A predominate challenge in managing grants is not exceeding the grant budget. Automated grant management capabilities help you stay within the budget for the entire life cycle of the grant. How? They help eliminate the risk of overspending by monitoring daily business transactions and expenditures, and provide warnings when you exceed the budget or when transactions are allocated outside of a grant timeline. These early warnings (early in the budget or project period) give your staff the opportunity to work closely with the sponsor to resolve issues and achieve successful project outcomes. And automatic budget verification against your project and grant gives you peace of mind that you will maintain budget accountability. |
 | Manage grants that span multiple fiscal years easier.
Projects and grants often do not fall within an organization's typical fiscal year, so organizations often require the ability to define a start and end date for each project and grant. Automated grant management makes it possible to distribute a specific transaction to multiple grants, projects, or both. With the flexibility of multiple distribution paths for a single transaction, you can streamline every transaction entry. Grant management applications can support grants that span multiple fiscal years and not limit transactions and reports to company fiscal periods. |
 | Definite accountability.
Organizations submit applications to funding agencies to receive financial aid for a specific reason over a certain time. The sponsor usually attaches restrictions and conditions to the expenditure of an awarded grant. The funds received may be paid out in a variety of ways, ranging from full payment to periodic payments. The grantee must monitor programs and projects with great scrutiny to ensure budget integrity and accountability for every dollar spent. Automated grant management makes it easier to monitor, adjust, and report on the progress of the grant funds. |
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