Strategic grant management software

Problem:

With performance and liability scorching the grant community, grant managers could no longer meet the expense to simply trail their colossal and speckled data.

The grant managers were expected to:

• Ensure coalition of grant program activities with the grantor requirements and budget.
• Establish cost effectiveness of program activities to corroborate the success of the program’s goals and objectives.
• Produce budgets and track expenditures at an individual activity level to determine the best performing activities.
• Analyze the impact of activities in relation to the costs incurred.
• Plot the cost to performance relation into federal reporting formats to show accountability of the programs.

However, the grant managers were not accustomed to perform these activities at individual activity level and generate the complex reports as per the federal standards.

The above factors resulted in a need for grant management software to help the grantees accomplish “more with less” thereby achieving a cost-effective program.

Solution:

Sveltoz, then built a strategic software to manage grants and build transparent, accountable, cost-effective grant management reports.

The software provided the ability to:

• Manage goals, objectives and benchmarks at individual activity level.
• Automate management of budgets at high level of details in multiple formats to track the grant revenues, expenditures and performance.
• Assess the financial effectiveness of the grant goals, objectives and related activities to give valuable insight on best and least –performing activities.
• Reconcile data to the primary accounting system.
• Capture time associated with each activity and link time and effort directly to services provided.
• Track grant proposal data, correspondence, documents and provides success rates by funders and grant writers.

Key Business impact:

• Hours of trolling through spreadsheets to manage budgets, reconcile data and generate reports were reduced to just few mouse clicks, thus providing detailed customized reporting at finger tips.
• The activity costs were directly linked to goals, objectives and benchmarks revealing the true cost-effectiveness of the grant programs.
• The needless effort and frustration for grant team and accounting departments were completely eliminated. The grant managers were able to compare the cost-effectiveness to assess best and least performing activities and decide on activities to be retained or repeated in future.
• The grant managers were able to concentrate more on goals and objectives and not worry on the budget information.
• The grant reimbursements were processed instantly and incredibly with less paper work resulting in improved cash flow for non-profits!!

Key Implementation Challenges:

• Integration with accounting software – Quick book.
• Computational logics to handle intricate mathematical reckonings.
• Implementation of product licensing model.
• Composite report generation in multifaceted layouts and disparity.
• Inculcate business intelligence into the software to tactfully analyze the discreet fund data.

Key success factors:

• The application was built with five most powerful components with a multi faceted solution for managing, tracking and reporting grant funds with simplicity and ease.
• The application with its embedded business intelligence and complex data analyzing methodology eliminated the tedious, manual effort in managing, analyzing and reconciling hazy and colossal grant fund data.
• The application also offered comprehensive, lawful reports.

Technologies used:

• Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
• VB .net, C#.Net, Asp.Net, Ajax, JQuery, Infragistics controls, Quick books SDK