We know that managing grants can at times be confusing and even overwhelming–we’re here to help. Let’s take a look at a foundational piece for your success: your grant management strategy.
When you don’t have an effective strategy in place to manage grants, and store your data and documents, and stay on top of deadlines and requirements, it is easy to make mistakes. Mistakes can put your program objectives at risk, harm your relationship with funders, and potentially prevent you from getting funding in the future. In some cases, they can result in having to pay back the award.
To help you avoid mistakes, we want to give you 3 tips that will help you manage your grants effectively, report efficiently, and perform well in the Single Audit so you can keep winning more funding in the future.
1. Create and Standardize Reporting Processes
One of the best ways to organize and manage your grants is to create standard processes.
Establishing standard processes:
- Gives insight into your program’s financials
- Helps you stick to the project timeline
- Puts you in a better position for the Single Audit
To ensure compliance and maximize impact, one area to tackle from the start of your grant program is reporting. Uniform Grant Guidance (UGG) requires you to report on your financial progress (i.e., your “performance”) to your funder at least once a year, but you don’t have to wait until the end of the year to run these reports.
By creating a standard process to run reports for yourself once a quarter, or even once a month, you can fix inconsistencies between your budget and expenses before they get out of hand.
Here is an example of a simple standardized monthly reporting process:
- Run a budget status report at the end of every month
- Review budget discrepancies and correct/resolve them as necessary
- Review expenditures and double check that the expenses are allowable
- Establish a sign-off procedure with another team member to ensure these activities have been performed and double checked
Standardized processes like this help you catch problems early, fix them faster, and ensure you have the records and receipts you need before closeout.
A grant management system (GMS) can help you run reports anytime you want with just a few clicks, plus automation of standard workflows. If you don’t have a GMS, you will have to manually collect all this data. Make sure you document everything correctly and ensure the right people are signing off on every step.
Related Reading: 3 Steps for Effective Grant Reporting
2. Effectively Manage Your Calendar
Between application deadlines, reporting deadlines, and day-to-day tasks, it can feel like there are just too many dates to remember. Keeping track of deadlines is something that trips up even the most seasoned grants professionals but managing them effectively is essential. Missing application deadlines means you don’t receive critical funding, and missing reporting deadlines can put you at risk of noncompliance.
Creating a grant calendar with automated reminders keeps you on top of deadlines and tasks and helps you plan effectively. Doing this at the very start of your grant award enables you to prepare in advance for these deadlines and communicate to others who are also impacted. Using a GMS certainly eases your calendar management challenges. For example, AmpliFund features a calendar that automatically imports your tasks and deadlines, gives you and your team visibility into what is due and when, and sends you email reminders to help ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
You can still keep track of deadlines by setting task/deadline reminders with your online calendar if you don’t have a GMS. But give yourself extra time to import the individual tasks and, if your calendar is not shared with all stakeholders, make sure you’re communicating all dates and expectations clearly and frequently to others so they can keep track too.
Related Resource: Webinar On Demand | Building Capacity
3. Centralize Everything
Does the thought of sorting through hundreds of paper records and receipts at the end of the year fill you with dread?
When you are managing an award, all your receipts, records, and internal communications can overwhelm you if you’re trying to cross-reference everything saved on paper with the data you have recorded in spreadsheets. If you also need to request information from others, the burden of reporting grows.
Centralizing your documents and data in a shared location is a critical step. In addition to the administrative headaches, not centralizing all of your grant data in one system can result in lost drawdown, noncompliance, and reduced opportunities for winning future funding.
Disparate systems add to these challenges. Grant data centralization is much more plausible, therefore, with grant management software. A GMS becomes the single source of truth—housing all of your data, documents, and internal communications in one place. As a cloud-based system, this gives you access to everything you need whenever you need it.
With AmpliFund, for example, you can pull any type of data from the system into reports to monitor progress, communications, and documentation in a matter of minutes because it’s all stored in the same place. You can even create custom reports to track information for your specific needs.
Additionally, centralizing your grant data streamlines audits and demonstrates to funders that you have the program infrastructure in place to manage more funding in the future.
Related Reading: Discover how Kalamazoo County implemented a GMS to centralize data and standardize processes.
Learn more about the practical application of grant data centralization with our Grant Management Centralization Guide.
