Grant post-award and compliance

Award Terms and compliance

Once a grant is awarded, the agreement usually comes with conditions attached. Award Terms, on the grant's Schedule & Work tab, records what those conditions are, and the compliance checklist keeps each one visible until it is satisfied.

Award Terms

This is the reference copy of what the agreement says, so nobody has to re-read the PDF to answer a question. Click Record Award Terms to fill it in.

Field	Record
Agreement reference	The funder's own number for this award.
Executed date	When the agreement was signed.
Restrictions	What the money may and may not be used for.
Allowable cost notes	The detail of what counts as an eligible expense.
Reporting terms	What the funder requires and when. Then create the actual dated obligations on the Schedule so they appear in reminders and the Work Queue.
Payment terms	How and when the funder pays. Then build the installments on the Schedule.
Acknowledgment requirements	How the funder must be credited: logo use, wording, placement.
Indirect cost rate	The rate the award allows.

These fields are reference material. Nothing here enforces anything or blocks a transaction; they exist so the terms are readable by everybody on the team, not only whoever negotiated them.

The grant period itself lives on the grant, in the Programs & Dates editor, rather than being repeated here.

The compliance checklist

A checklist of the conditions attached to the award, each one an attestation you can mark as met.

Click Start from a Standard Checklist to begin from a set covering the conditions most awards carry, or Add One Condition to build your own:

• Signed award agreement on file (required)
• Current audited financial statements on file (required)
• Indirect cost rate agreement signed
• Funds tracked separately from unrestricted revenue (required)
• Required insurance in force for the award period
• Conflict of interest policy acknowledged by staff on this award
• Reporting schedule agreed and recorded on the schedule tab (required)
• Funder acknowledgment and logo usage confirmed

Edit, remove or add to these freely. Each item has a category (Financial, Legal, Reporting, Insurance, Policy, Acknowledgment or Other) used for grouping, and a required flag.

Compliance status

Status	Means
Not started	Nobody has looked at it.
In progress	Being worked on.
Met	Satisfied. Record who verified it and when.
At risk	A problem you want visible before it becomes a finding.
Not applicable	Does not apply to this award.

Only required items that are neither Met nor Not applicable count as outstanding, both for the panel's own count and for closeout readiness.

Why compliance items have no due date

A compliance item is a standing attestation, such as "we hold a current audit" or "the indirect cost agreement is signed". It is either true or it is not; there is no date by which it becomes owed.

Anything the funder wants by a deadline is a schedule item of type Compliance instead. That way every dated obligation lives in exactly one place and appears exactly once in the Work Queue, the reminders and the Agenda.

Related

• Requirements and the grant schedule
• Outcome measures and results
• Closing out and renewing a grant

Outcome measures and results

Outcomes are what you promised the funder you would achieve, and what actually happened. Set the measures up when the award lands, record figures as they come in, and the reporting is largely written by the time the report is due.

Setting up a measure

1. Open the grant and go to Schedule & Work → Outcomes.
2. Click Add a Measure.
3. Fill in the fields below, then save.

Field	What it is
Name	What you are measuring, in the funder's own words where possible.
Definition	Exactly how it is counted, so two people reporting on it agree.
Type	Output: what the program produced or delivered. Outcome: the change that followed for the people served. Impact: the longer-term effect. Reporting language only.
Unit	Count, Percentage, Currency, Hours or Other. Controls how figures are formatted.
Baseline	Where things stood before the award.
Target and target date	What you committed to, and by when.
Owner	Who is responsible for producing the figure.

The two settings that decide whether your number is right

Two fields look technical and are not optional detail. Get either wrong and the measure will report a plausible figure that is simply false.

Direction: which way is good.

• Higher is better: people served, sessions delivered.
• Lower is better: dropout rate, waiting time, readmissions.

"Reduce the dropout rate to 5%" is met by going below its target. Treated as a higher-is-better measure, a program that halved its dropouts would be reported as badly short.

Aggregation: how periods combine.

• Adds up over the award: period results are summed. Use for counts of people, sessions or items. Four quarters of 25 is 100.
• Latest reading counts: the most recent period stands alone. Use for rates, percentages and averages. Four quarters of 60% is 60%, not 240%.

Recording a result

1. Add a result on the measure.
2. Set the period the figure covers, and the actual value.
3. Add a narrative: the context a number alone does not carry.
4. Attach evidence: a note, or a document already on the grant.
5. If the figure was filed as part of a reporting requirement, link it to that requirement. The result is then traceable to the report it went into.
6. Save.

How progress is shown

Current value is calculated from your results using the aggregation you chose. A measure is on target when the current value has reached the target in the direction that counts.

A progress percentage is shown only for higher-is-better measures. For a lower-is-better measure there is no honest single percentage: "reduce dropouts from 20% to 5%, currently at 8%" is neither 160% nor 62%, and either figure would mislead. The values and the on-target flag say more than a manufactured percentage would.

A measure past its target date and not on target is flagged, so it surfaces while there is still time to say something about it.

Related

• Requirements and the grant schedule
• Award Terms and compliance
• Closing out and renewing a grant

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:

Gate	Clear when
Reporting requirements settled	Every requirement is accepted, waived or cancelled.
Payments received or closed	Every installment is fully received, waived or cancelled.
Compliance conditions met	Every required condition is met or marked not applicable.
Final figures reported	Every active measure that has a target has at least one result against it. A measure without a target was never a promise, so it does not gate.
Open tasks cleared	No tasks on the grant are still open or in progress.

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 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 track spending against the grant on Budget & Spending, use it as the source for the figure you attest.

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

Completing a closeout

1. Open the grant and go to Schedule & Work → Closeout.
2. Work through any outstanding gates, or record why you are proceeding without them.
3. Enter the attested unspent amount with its source and as-of date, and any funds returned.
4. Add closing notes.
5. Save the 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, check the date shift, then click Create Renewal. 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
• Date Submitted, the decision date and the executed date
• 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 as a draft and stays linked to the grant it came from, so the funding relationship reads as a chain rather than as unrelated records.

Related

• Payment schedules
• Award Terms and compliance
• Outcome measures and results

Grant documents

Files attached to a grant: the proposal, the award letter, the signed agreement, the reports. Keeping them on the grant means the paperwork travels with the record instead of living in somebody's email.

Adding a document

Upload through the content manager with the grant selected, or click Add a Document on the grant's Documents tab. Documents are stored in your organization's content manager, which is why uploading also requires the Document Management right.

Document purposes

Tag each document with what it is for, so somebody looking for last year's signed agreement is not reading filenames:

• Proposal: the application itself
• Agreement: the award letter and signed contract
• Budget: the budget submitted or approved
• Report: narrative and financial reports filed
• Evidence: supporting material behind an outcome figure
• Correspondence: letters and emails worth keeping
• Other

Documents are grouped by purpose. A document with no purpose is fine: every document uploaded before purposes existed has none, and unclassified is a supported end state.

Versions

When a document replaces an earlier one, such as a revised budget or a countersigned agreement, link it as a new version rather than uploading it alongside. The list then shows only the current version, with the earlier ones folded into its history.

1. Upload the new document.
2. From the document's actions, record it as a replacement.
3. Select the document it replaces, then click Record Replacement.

Two rules apply. A document already superseded cannot be replaced again, so pick the current version instead. And two documents that each already have a version history cannot be merged, because the result would have two documents claiming the same version numbers.

Unlink a version to pull a document back out of a history.

Related

• Award Terms and compliance
• Outcome measures and results
• Grant Center permissions and access

The Answer Library

Every funder asks for your mission statement, your EIN, your board list, your standard evaluation approach. The Answer Library stores those once so you stop hunting through last year's proposal for wording you already have.

Find it under Grant Center → Settings → Answer Library, or open it from a grant with Saved Answers on the grant's Schedule.

Adding an answer

1. Go to Grant Center → Settings → Answer Library.
2. Click Add an Answer.
3. Record the question as a funder would ask it, then the answer text.
4. Choose a category, add tags, and set a review date.
5. Save.

Categories cover the sections most applications ask for in some wording or other: organization background, mission and vision, statement of need, program description, methodology, evaluation, staffing, governance, budget narrative, partnerships, equity and inclusion, sustainability, and other. They affect filtering and nothing else.

Finding an answer

Search questions, tags and answer text, and narrow the list by category or by status. The status filter is how an administrator pulls up exactly what is waiting on review. Past review date only shows the answers that are due a check.

Status: the part that matters

Text from this library goes to a funder over your organization's name. So "somebody wrote this once" and "this has been checked and is current" have to be visibly different things. Otherwise the library's convenience is exactly what makes a stale paragraph easy to send.

Status	Means
Draft	Written but not checked. Usable, and clearly marked wherever it appears.
Approved	Checked and cleared for reuse as it stands.
Needs Review	Waiting for an administrator to check it, usually because it was approved and its text has since changed.
Retired	Kept for the record, not offered for reuse.

Three rules protect the Approved badge:

• Editing the text of an approved answer sends it to Needs Review, for everyone, administrators included. A self-review is not a review, and Approved is what the next person reaching for the paragraph reads as evidence that somebody else checked it. An administrator can approve it again in one more step.
• Only an administrator can move an answer into Approved. When anyone else marks an answer Approved, it is saved as Needs Review instead, so it goes to the reviewers.
• Anyone who may edit can retire, un-retire, or leave an answer as a draft. Choosing Retired while you edit the text is respected; it is not redirected to review.

When an answer stops being approved, its approval stamp is cleared rather than left standing. When it is approved again, the stamp records who approved the current text, and when.

Review notifications

When an answer becomes Needs Review, the reviewers are told: each gets an in-app notification and an email naming the question, so it does not sit unnoticed in the list.

The top of the Answer Library says who that is: Review notifications go to followed by the addresses. Grant administrators can click Change to name the reviewers, as a list of email addresses separated by commas. If nobody is named, your grant administrators are notified.

Review dates

Set a review date on anything that goes out of date, such as staff counts, financial figures, or "we have served X people since". Answers past their review date are flagged as stale and counted at the top of the library, so a review is a short list rather than a re-read of everything.

Viewing and copying an answer

Every saved answer has a View button, available to everyone who can see the library. It opens the full text, read-only, with its word count and a Copy button. Copying from here does not record a use, so it is the way to read or borrow a paragraph without claiming it went into an application.

Using an answer on a grant

1. Open the grant and click Saved Answers on its Schedule. Retired answers are not offered.
2. Find the answer and click Copy & Record. The text is copied to your clipboard the moment you click, and the use is recorded against the grant.
3. Paste it into the application.

If your browser blocks the copy, the use is still recorded and the text is shown so you can select and copy it by hand.

Recording the use means the library shows where each answer has been used. That is useful when a funder asks a follow-up question about something you wrote, and useful for spotting the answers that carry the most weight.

Answers that have been used cannot be deleted, so the record of what you sent stays intact. Retire them instead.

Related

• Grant details
• Grant documents

Grant history

The History panel on a grant is the chronological record of what happened to it: every stage move, and every significant change anybody made.

What is in it

Two sources, shown as one list:

• Stage changes: each move, with who made it, when, any note recorded at the time, and how long the grant had spent in the stage it left.
• Events: the changes every other part of the module records as it writes. Team changes, schedule items created and settled, payments reconciled, terms edited, results reported, closeout completed.

Each entry shows what happened, who did it, and when, in your organization's timezone.

It is read-only

You cannot write to the history, edit an entry, or remove one. It is built from records the module already keeps rather than from a separate log, which is why it cannot fall out of step with what actually happened.

Very long histories are capped, and the panel says so when the list is truncated rather than implying the grant's history simply stops there.

Related

• Working with the pipeline
• Notes on a grant

Grant Center reports and dashboards

The Overview tab is the state of your portfolio. Every figure and chart on it clicks through to the grants behind it, so nothing on the dashboard is a dead end.

The headline figures

Figure	Exactly what it counts
Active pipeline	The total requested amount across grants that are still live: Draft, Initial Research, On Hold and Submitted. Not restricted to the selected period: it is a current position, not a period total.
Awarded	The total awarded amount for grants whose decision date falls in the selected period.
Received	The total of donations linked to grants and received in the selected period. Actual money, not forecast.
Win Rate	Awarded decisions divided by awarded plus declined decisions, as a percentage, for decisions in the period. Withdrawn and cancelled grants are excluded from both sides, because you did not lose a grant you chose not to pursue. Click the card to open the grants behind the figure.
Declined	The count of grants declined in the period, and the total that had been requested for them.
Expected	The money projected to arrive in the selected period. Always equals the total of the cash-flow chart's expected series.

Each headline figure is compared with the equivalent prior period, so you see direction as well as level.

Charts and queues

• Cash flow: expected against received over time, with the two series visually distinct.
• Pipeline by stage: count and requested dollars per stage. Click a segment to open the pipeline filtered to the grants behind it.
• Top funders: where your funding is concentrated.
• Deadlines: a prioritized list rather than another chart: overdue, this week, this month, later.
• Operational band: My Open Work, overdue obligations, grants without a next action, renewals approaching, Team Workload, stage aging. See The Work Queue.

Filtering

The date range at the top applies consistently to every period-based figure and chart on the page. Figures that describe a current position rather than a period, such as active pipeline and outstanding obligations, say so.

If your access is limited to assigned grants, every figure is scoped to the grants you can open. You will never see an organization-wide total you are not allowed to drill into.

The Reports module

Beyond the dashboard, grant reports live under Reports, with the full filter, column and export behavior every other BetterUnite report has:

• Grants: all grants, or awarded grants only.
• Grantors: funders and what each has given.
• Grant milestones: deadlines and schedule items across the portfolio.
• Upcoming Expected Payments: the money funders are due to send, filterable by funder, program and date. View Full Report on Expected Income opens it.

Save a configured report as a saved view to return to it without rebuilding the filters.

Exporting

On the Pipeline tab, choose Actions → Export to File. The file contains exactly the rows your filters return, in your current sort order, with the columns you have chosen, so what you export is what you are looking at.