Grant management is a labour-intensive processes that can stress the most competent of staff. Funders needs a grant management system that reduces the admin burden so that staff can spend more of their time proactively engaging with applicants and awardees, the part of the job that can really help make an impact.
Grants Management systems must take care of everything – from creating grant programmes and applications, the ability to process them, communicate with applicants and reviewers, and post-award management. They should also have the abilty to effectively manage award finances and payments, and the capability to request progress reports.
This combination of features ensures that funds can be readily dispersed without undue delay caused by, manual, outdated processes often depending on numerous spreads sheets or an outdated system well past its useful life. Read on to discover exactly how such a system can help your staff keep on top of applications and further your mission.
The Best Grant Management Systems Save Time
Did you know that workers spend 50% of their time manually searching for files? And that 70% of business leaders spend between 45 minutes and three hours per day (at least) on mundane, repetitive tasks?
Nobody wants to have to repeat the same task multiple times or worse to make mistakes due to tired and stressed staff. That’s why it’s important that a grant management system provides a single source of the truth that has smart tools to improve the quality and consistency of information being received and sent from the system, such as re-usable templates for applications, and a question bank that stores standard questions that can be reused across multiple scheme application forms, rather than having to design a new form from a scratch each and every time.
Ease of use is a key requirement for improving the efficiency of the workflow. User interfaces must be intuitive with a clean design, making use of drag and drop functionality wherever necessary, and other modern day technologies.
Data Management
Robust data management is the foundation of any grant management system. Data should be stored in the cloud, accessible by all stakeholders and administrators, and should be able to integrate with other systems that need it as input. The data should be stored in secure and trusted data centres.
The system should be able to store and manage data generated at all stages of the grant lifecycle, making the role of all administrators run as smoothly as possible.
A cloud based grant management system makes the above easy, and enables effective communication between all parties. It also ensures maximum uptime and prevents data loss, among many other benefits.
Data management is not just about the back end of the system. For staff to be able to do their jobs efficiently, it’s important that they have a clear overview of the information that’s relevant to them. This means having a dashboard that’s intuitive to use and allows for information to be easily filtered. This provides a clean and uncluttered view so people can focus on what matters. Furthermore, your system should allow for large volumes of data to be easily exported in a format that allows you to undertake detailed and insightful analysis.
Project Tracking
Grant staff need to track applications from the moment they are received, through the review, decision, award, and post-award stages. The system should have features that enable staff to efficiently take the required actions and provide updates to multiple stakeholders throughout the journey. Users should also be able to create and assign work to case officers and tasks, and control access to what colleagues can view or do.
Communication and Collaboration
A critical role of any system is to facilitate communication between all users and stakeholders, internal and external. For managing communications with applicants and grantees, an in-built Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is the answer – or the option to integrate with your existing CRM. Staff can then have records of all communication as well as previous applications. (The accurate record of all communications and transactions is also important for fraud prevention purposes.) The system should also facilitate auditors reviewing the process and outputs of your grant making.
Bulk processing capability helps keep things progressing on time, making it easy to email reminders on deadlines for applications, reporting, and so on.
Resource Sharing
To collaborate easily, users need to be able to share documents within the system, such as site visit notes, budgets, progress reports and day to day communications . This provides easy access, removing the need to email files to each other. This is critical for a system to be able to function as a centralised single source of truth for all grant related activities.
Again, a cloud based grant management system takes care of this – it ensures all information relating to applicants, grantees, , or any other facet of your operations is securely stored in a centralised location.
Budgeting, Reporting and Compliance
Your software needs to track grant funds and progress against grant conditions and project milestones, as well as generate a broad range of reports. Flexi-Grant makes it easy to capture and manage detailed financial information and supports the full traceability and audit of all financial activities. The solution can report on every field of every application and monitoring form, along with other essential data captured throughout the process.
Managing large volumes of grant applications effectively and efficiently is serious business– and staying up to date with regulatory and compliance changes can be challenging. Therefore, a good grant management system needs to let administrators set permissions and view activities within the system, as this is critical for monitoring and overseeing compliance. Additionally, cybersecurity and data integrity is of upmost importance. The data must be captured in accordance with GDPR requlations, with the confidence that it will be stored securely within a system that is impenetrable to external attacks.
Integration with Other Systems
A good system needs to integrate with other third-party systems, such as accounting and payroll software. This provides the most comprehensive solution in terms of your broader operations.
Our Finance API lets you integrate Flexi-Grant with any major finance system to process payments at scale. We also support integrations with research-focused tools for research grants, and other specialised systems.
Conclusion
The best grant management systems save time, capture data, and store it in a one place – no more looking for key data in a range of different sources. They’re intuitive and easy to use, make collaboration straightforward, and let staff easily track applications from the time they’re submitted through to the post-award stage. They also integrate with other crucial systems, generate comprehensive reports, and take the legwork out of compliance.
To discover more about how Flexi-Grant can help your organisation get funds to those who need them as efficiently and effectively as possible, book a demo today.
