Seems frustrating and counter-intuitive, right?
In light of challenging news like that, it’s more important than ever to make sure your grant management process is the best it can be.
In our work developing research administration software, we’ve discovered five key grant management problems to watch out for. See if you can relate to any of these red flags:
1. You have bottlenecks due to manual, redundant methods
Here’s a less-than-ideal scenario: Each staff member has their own system for filing and organizing grant documents. The team often handles the same spreadsheets, Word documents, and other source materials numerous times, checking for inaccuracies, proofreading, and managing revisions. Each staff person relies on their own methods to track deadlines, calendars, and to-do lists.
This is a problem for several reasons. Not only does it waste time due to duplicate data entry, but it means there are lots of opportunities for errors to slip in, from typos to outdated information someone forgot to delete. Worst-case, it exposes you to risk of noncompliance!
2. Staying in compliance is difficult
Problem: Your organization has trouble managing compliance requirements and time-consuming reporting that documents the use of funds, especially when it comes to federal grants or highly regulated sectors.
Again, this opens you up to audit findings, fines, loss of funding, and other noncompliance penalties. Plus, your staff is probably irritated by how long it takes to run reports, which can ultimately lead to high turnover. If you want to save time, keep staff happy, and make compliance easier, grant management software is a must.
3. Reporting is a long, frustrating process
If there’s no central or easy way to report on allocation of resources, you’ve got a problem. Without up-to-date reports on, for example, how much research funding is left on a certain grant, principal investigators may inadvertently overspend, and then you have to scramble to reallocate money and come up with the extra funds from somewhere else.
Eliminate those issues with a funding management solution that gives you visibility into spending and can make cost projections!
4. You can’t consolidate grant management
Is it an administrative nightmare when your organization gets more than one grant at once? Does the team often lose track of important information for reporting on each grant? Is it impossible to consolidate grants and keep each one organized separately, for easy reporting and risk reduction?
Those are all big red flags! If you want your research program to grow, it has to be able to scale. Multiple simultaneous grants shouldn’t plunge everyone into chaos. With software to manage the entire lifecycle of a grant, and support numerous grants, it’s so much easier to keep track of all the necessary details, simplify reporting, and be a responsible steward of even more funding.
5. It’s hard to communicate and collaborate
Maybe when your office or program was just starting out, one person could manage the grants. But now it takes multiple people, and it’s much more difficult to communicate quickly with everyone and ensure you’re all on the same page.
If you’re struggling to connect the development office, grant office, research staff, and other stakeholders, consider adopting a grant management solution that’s paperless and cloud-based, so you can all use it simultaneously. Electronic routing is another feature that can help connect teams, with work flowing to the next person responsible so everything gets done on time.
Effective grant management is more important than ever. As we face more research funding challenges, focus on flexible and simple solutions for effective grant management. To see powerful, easy-to-use, and cutting-edge grant management software, contact our team today!
