Your Cheat Sheet to Better Grant Budgeting & Financial Reporting

In our recent webinar, I detailed ways to improve grant budgeting and ease financial reporting. With only 20 minutes to share this, we moved through some critical best practices fairly quickly. Here’s a cheat sheet of some of what we covered, but I encourage you to view the recording to gather all the insights and best practices. 

Key considerations for your budget planning process:  

• Strong financial planning in the early grant stages sets the stage for successful program implementation and reporting.
• Ultimately, having the right processes in place is essential to be able to stick with this plan. Ensure that you have SOPs and communicate the policies well with the right training to support your team.
• Then consider how your budget and plans impact each stage of your grant lifecycle—and how each phase impacts your budget and plans. 

When it comes to reporting requirements and financial management, I touched on the impact of Uniform Guidance, agency guidance, and the specific award documentation. The key things to remember here are knowing where to find the details of your grant’s reporting requirements. You may need to use specific templates and provide documentation. Generally, things you'll want to track include: 

• How much was spent?
• When?
• On what?
• What was the impact?
• Do you have the documentation to prove this? 

Finally, we touched on how technology can support your reporting efforts, financial goals, and compliance. It is worth mentioning that the integration of a grant management system (GMS) with an ERP or financial system, is a tremendous boon to anyone managing grants.

With an integrated GMS, you can: 

• Gain visibility and insights into grant-specific financial activity
• Capture budget data through the lifecycle of a grant
• ID budget and grant data at a detailed level
• Produce real-time reporting specific to funder requirements

(Check out our blog, Choosing the Right Path: ERP + GMS to learn more.) 

There's a lot more detail and valuable insights shared in this webinar, so I hope you’ll take 20 minutes to watch.

And, as always, if you’d like to learn more about how the AmpliFund grant management system can help you deliver the right reports, sure up your compliance, manage the grant-related financial data, and maximize the impact of your grant funds, schedule a demo with us today.  

   Dan Holtz, CGMS, LSSGB

   Director of Implementation Services

Formerly a financial analyst with the Department of Defense, Dan brought his experience aligning systems and processes with the requirements of federal programs to AmpliFund in 2018. A Certified Grant Management Specialist, he oversees a team of implementation leads and also directly manages implementation for a variety of customers. His goal is to instill best practices for data management and process creation to increase drawdown, decrease risk, and amplify the impact of grant programs.

*Photo by  kanchanachitkhamma from Canva.