Effective grants management is critical to keep the flow of research funding in support of today’s leading research organizations.
Since Cayuse serves the nation’s leading research-focused organizations, we’re always on the lookout for informative, timely, and helpful grant management resources.
One of those is the Grants Managers Network’s online magazine, GMNsight. The publication shares expertise on grants management and trends in modern grantmaking, and they recently published our article, “3 Tips to Plug the Gaps in Your Current Grant Management Process.”
In a nutshell, the article provides insight for today’s research office seeking to improve the grant management process. It outlines the key areas that signal an inefficient grant management process. With each trouble area, we included an associated best practice to address the challenges.
As the article notes, outdated or manually intensive grants administration creates bottlenecks and wasted effort. An over-reliance on physical files and highly manual business processes waste time, resources and frustrate the entire team.
3 main grants management challenges
Here are three key challenges and tips on how to overcome them:
Challenge: Bottlenecks with manual, redundant methods
Solution: As a best practice, organizations should go paperless so you can easily store, access, and manage all documents digitally. You can store multiple documents (such as the original proposal, the notice of award, funding authority notifications, budget forms, routing sheets, agency progress, and financial reports) for each grant or proposal. Once stored, they can be easily accessed and displayed without any manual intervention.
Challenge: Compliance with reporting requirements, such as documenting personnel expenses
Solution: An electronic effort reporting system offers benefits such as single source data retention, ease of access/use by administrators and certifiers, and automated reporting. These benefits, as well as the benefit of electronic record storage, provides the basis for financial and compliance management and audit support.
Challenge: Communication and collaboration across many stakeholders and departments
Solution: When multiple people are involved in managing grants, automating the process gives users instant access to information at any time during the grant lifecycle. Many organizations benefit from easy-to-use cloud-based interfaces like Sponsored Projects that include dashboards, display screens, and reports. Many solutions offer user permissions via an expandable folder system that streamlines the organization of proposals and awards according to user defined filters.
Efficient grants management is best achieved with grants management systems. With such technology, teams are better able to organize and access essential information for both day-to-day management and organization-wide reporting, as well as meeting requirements placed by funding agencies.
Learn more about effective grants management
Looking for an effective grants management process? Get in touch–we’d love to share strategies geared specifically to your needs.
