Ride the Storm: Navigating Through Unstable Periods / Katerina Rudko (Belka G...
Grants Management Software for seeking funds and to administer the grant process
1. Grants Management Software for seeking funds and to administer the grant process
Grants management software is a program that helps non-profit organizations in seeking
funds and the universities to administer and automate the grant process. Important
functions such as grant discovery, proposal submission, budget planning, regulatory
compliance, reporting and tracking of projects are included in the grant management
software. Administrative work relating to grants can be pretty burdensome if not for the
grants management software.
The role played by grants management software
A lot of tasks like grant writing and regulatory compliance are the responsibility of the
grant administrator. They are the ones who are responsible for verifying and short-listing
the project teams that are eligible to receive the grant. This involves a lot of hard work
and a lot of time has to be spent to do a thorough job. To make all this less time
consuming the Grants Management Software is designed; it automates some of the
functions like grant discovery, tracking the work flow, etc. Apart from all this the grants
management software helps to streamline other relative activities like grant awarding,
verifying the status of the organization to see if it is exempted from tax.
There are a lot of variations in grant management software and all of them have their own
specific tools and applications to simplify the management of both the pre award and post
award process.
As the term suggests, the pre award process oversees everything before the grant is
actually awarded; some of them are filling and submitting the application for a grant, and
receiving a rejection letter from the grantor or a grant award. Whereas, post award
process includes things done after a grant is awarded, some of them are buying the
required equipment needed for research, maintaining accounts and communicating with
the grantor and reporting all the developments.
Different types of grants management software available
Most of the Grants Management System types include features necessary for the
complete cycle of the grant. But some of them are designed just for the pre award process
and yet there are others that cater entirely to grant discovery relating to the pre award
process and some others exclusively for the post award process. But there are some truly
comprehensive solutions that take care of all the functions relating to pre and post award
processes.
A lot of grant management software is made available as a hosted service where the
customers have to pay the vendors for allowing online access to the software, whereas in
the cloud service the hosted software is made available as an application at the vendors
own facilities. Benefit of hosted software is that in this there is no necessity of internal
IT support.
2. Market for grants management software
Several organizations like schools, colleges and universities rely heavily of grant funding
and the federal government spends billions towards grant money. All of them need the
grants management software to make grants management smooth, easy and error free for
them. The companies engaged in designing grant management software mainly operate in
the market related to information and management of grants.