Successful research organizations use grants management software for oversight and administration of funding portfolios. These organizations rely on grants to fund their research enterprises, which are composed of highly skilled scientists, post-doctoral fellows, and research staff organized in teams led by key investigators. Key investigators serve as the principal investigators on a series of awards designed to fund their laboratories and research interests.
In many cases, a sizable grant funding portfolio is required for this purpose. While the subject matter of the individual grants in the portfolio are usually similar, they differ in both their amounts and budget periods. These two differences can cause substantial variations in the overall value of the portfolio over time and complicate its management. To handle these complications, research-focused investigators turn to administrators for help.
So research administrators are usually responsible for helping oversee the various grant portfolios within their organization to ensure their investigators have adequate short-term and long-term funding. They track portfolios that fund individual teams as well as combined funding for their entire organization. Grants management software helps with grant portfolio management in terms of monitoring both current awards and proposals for future funding from federal agencies including National Institute of Health (NIH) grants.
Grants management software for post-award administration
Administrators use grants management software to track current awards in several areas of post-award administration, such as:
- Managing budgets and expenditures. This involves grant accounting activities including monitoring current balances, which entails not only tracking budgets and expenditures but also tracking encumbrances of personnel, non-personnel, and F&A transactions. Monitoring personnel encumbrances may involve projecting future payroll and fringe benefit charges based on project budget periods.
- Meeting deliverable schedules and closeout procedures. Meeting deliverable schedules requires tracking and adhering to agency reporting deadlines, which can vary by both sponsor and project. Following proper closeout procedures requires the timely completion of purchasing and payroll transactions and completing proper documentation.
- Following proper financial and research compliance policies and procedures. Financial compliance involves verifying appropriate charges. All charges must fall within the scope of the research project and comply with sponsor policies. Financial compliance involves overseeing purchasing and personnel activities, including time and effort certification. Research compliance is often an issue of ethics, which (depending on the nature of the research project) may be governed by committees such as IRB, IACUC, IBC, etc. Additional compliance policies and procedures include time and effort certification, financial conflict of interest, proper scientific conduct, etc.
- Preparing to submit competitive renewals to increase the likelihood of future funding. While submitting competitive renewals may be considered pre-award activity and thus part of monitoring future funding, preparation begins during the current budget period. The submission includes describing the continued benefits of the project, defining the scope of the research in terms of both the science and budget, and meeting agency deadlines. Since competitive renewals are usually more likely to be funded than new submissions, advanced preparation can solidify the funding opportunity.
These areas require different functionality within grants management software. For example, budget and expenditure management as well as financial compliance monitoring require accounting systems and procedures. Meeting deliverable schedules and following closeout procedures, research compliance monitoring, and preparing for the submission of competitive renewals require grant and research tracking functionality.
Grants management software for pre-award administration
Monitoring proposals for future funding involves several areas of pre-award administration, such as:
- Number of submissions. The goal of submission tracking is to ensure your organization maintains an adequate funding pipeline. Since not all applications are funded, the combined budgets from the submissions must exceed the team’s budgetary needs. Monitoring future proposals requires tracking the number being submitted, who is submitting them, the amount of future funding, when it would start, etc.
- Identifying possible sponsors. Identify which agencies have research agendas that are aligned with the interests of your key investigators and monitor their calls for proposals.
- Success rates. Measure success rates by investigator and by funding agency to identify who may need help with proposal development.
- Resubmissions. Encourage the modification and resubmission of rejected proposals when appropriate.
- Automate the generation of current and pending support. Tracking current and pending support is necessary for the creation of Current and Pending Support or Other Support pages needed for the submissions to NSF, NIH and other federal agencies. Automating their generation greatly expedites proposal development.
As in post-award administration, these areas involve different administrative functions and can be streamlined with grants management software solutions.
Centrally vs. departmentally controlled systems
Who controls the day-to-day management of a grant funding portfolio often depends on the size of the organization. In larger research organizations, departmental administrators handle this. In smaller organizations, central office administrators oversee it. While the administrative requirements are fundamentally the same, the challenges are quite different.
For example, large research organizations may have researchers who are funded from grants outside of their department, so total funding management requires access to information outside of their domain. Furthermore, the managerial focus of departmental chair and the type of research conducted within their department requires departmental administrators within the same organization to implement different management strategies. That’s why large organizations are more successful when grants management software solutions are deployed at the department or center level. Smaller organizations tend to find more success when implementing these systems centrally.
Next steps
For many organizations, grants management software helps streamline the complexities of grant and research administration. As regulations continue to change, administrators need software solutions to help meet these challenges. We’d love to help you figure out how to best meet your organization’s needs and challenges, so get in touch or check out our grants management success stories.
