Closing out and renewing a grant

Closeout is the end of an award: everything owed has been delivered, the money is settled, and the record can be closed. Renewal is the decision to go back for another one.

Readiness gates

The Closeout panel checks five things, all read from records that already exist rather than from a separate checklist that could drift out of step with them:

You can complete a closeout with gates outstanding — sometimes a funder simply waives a final report — but you have to record a reason, which stays on the record.

The money at closeout

Two different questions get confused at closeout, so Grant Center answers them separately.

What the funder still owes you is arithmetic: the awarded amount minus what has been received. Where the grant has a payment schedule, "received" is the sum of your reconciled allocations and the figure is exact. Where it does not, the grant's linked donations are used instead and the position is marked as unreconciled — the number is still the best available, but it is not installment-by-installment reconciliation and is not presented as though it were.

What your organization still holds unspent cannot be calculated, because BetterUnite does not record your expenses. So it is attested: you enter the amount, where the figure came from, and the date it was true. It is never shown as a calculated number, because it is not one.

If you return unspent funds, record the amount and the date you sent them back.

Completing a closeout

Open the grant and go to Schedule & work → Closeout.
Work through any outstanding gates, or record why you are proceeding without them.
Enter the attested unspent amount with its source and as-of date, and any funds returned.
Add closing notes.
Click Complete closeout.

Renewing

The Renewal panel shows the same readiness gates plus how your outcome measures actually performed — the case you will be making to the funder — and whether a renewal has already been created.

Click Renew to create next cycle's grant from this one. Dates move forward by the award's own period length, rounded to whole years, so a two-year award renews two years on. Where the period does not imply a length, twelve months is used. You can override the shift before confirming.

What carries over

Funder, funder contact, programs and campaigns
Owner and collaborators
Award terms, as a starting point
Compliance conditions, reset to not started
Outcome measures and their targets
Requirements and payment installments, with every date moved forward

What does not

Reported outcome figures
Donations reconciled against installments
Stage history and the closeout record
Submitted, decision and executed dates
The funder's agreement number

The split is deliberate. Everything describing what you intend to do again is copied; everything recording what happened last time is left behind, because carrying it forward would be a claim about the new award that nobody has made.

The renewal starts in draft and stays linked to the grant it came from, so the funding relationship reads as a chain rather than as unrelated records.