Simplify Your Grant Management Process With Grant Management System

Grant management plays a very important role in institutions like university and colleges as it has a direct impact on the research and quality of the institutions. Universities and colleges require funds to carry out various researches and administrative functions and this funds are made available by the government and private entities in the form of grants.

To manage this grants properly one needs to know all the rules and regulations. With private funders, the regulations and requirements can be adequately handled through good business and accounting practices. But it's different with governments grants especially federal grants. Uniform guidance offered by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget along with agency-specific and program specific requirements, requires that someone with the organization needs to develop an understanding of rules and regulations. While it's true knowing how to navigate the red tape is necessary, there is much more to grant management.

All the rules and regulation in the federal archives would not be able to keep on track if the institution doesn't conquer the following 4'c:

1. Communication

The most frequent grant management problem is the lack of communication rather than ignorance of rules and regulations. To make sure a granted funded program stay on track, an institute must communicate thoroughly, regularly and thoughtfully with the board members, staff members, partner organizations and the community.

2. Coordination

When implementing grant-funded programs, it's not unusual for one hand to be ignorant about what the other hand is doing. Without solid coordination of efforts, there will be miscommunication, overlap, dropped information and general chaos.

3. Cooperation

There is no space for fiefdom in grant management. Everyone has an important role to play and coordinate with other players. When roles are clearly defined and the involved behave in a collegial, professional manner, programming generally roles out in an organized way and stay on course to accomplish intended result.

4. Consistency

Good intention isn't enough, it does not matter one intends to communicate, coordinate and maintain good records and files. What matters whether one doing it on a regular basis.

Besides these, organizations specifically university and colleges need to make the complex and tedious grant management process more efficient. Today, manual reporting process in a research institution like university and college consumes time and effort of many grant recipients and funders. Manual reporting keep recipient away from what they actually meant to do. The decentralized data storage magnifies this problem. When the information is scattered in the inboxes and drives of the employees, it takes a massive effort to unite data and get an accurate understanding of spending and efficiency. Furthermore, decentralized data is at more risk of getting lost in the event of computer malfunction and employee turnover. Data loss put grant recipient at risk of falling out of the reporting compliance and losing time trying to recover lost information.

Grant Management System by Inknowledge

Many of the above challenges can be addressed with a modern technology solution. The Grant Management System offers revolutionary insight into all grant activity. It provides funders, recipients, sub-recipients and intermediaries with visibility into the same detailed insights. With the ability to provide department, office or program level reporting, grant recipient and intermediaries are empowered to seamlessly update their progress and easily report to their funders.

Grant Management System makes it easy to track and manage both budget and program activities. With powerful budget tracking tools, the grant recipients gain greater visibility into their own spending while meeting the demands of heightened budget reporting requirements.

Features of the Grant Management System:

1. The Grant Management System helps faculty submit their pre-proposal certification form and get approved by their department heads electronically.

2.  You can speed up the review process by sending out review request for submitted proposal to all reviewers and remove the bottleneck inherently present in a linear approval process.

3. You can let your faculty their award activity and let sponsored programs office personnel verify and issue award letters.

4. The budget builder in the Grant Management System helps to propose efforts in months, percentage or salary and let the builder calculate the rest for you.

5. Additional forms like indirect cost waiver, indirect cost distribution, cost share commitment and approval and multiple credit are all into the system to even allow for special cases to be handled online.

6. The Regulatory Compliance, Conflict of Interest management and technology transfer, can be tightly integrated into your grant management process to automate related business processes and improve compliance with internal and external policies and procedures.

7.  You can run reports at an institutional level or college or school level or drill-down to specific faculty to see their proposal and award activity. Draw insights and provide them to the administration. And also let faculty directly pull this information into their productivity reporting tools and showcase their accomplishments on their profiles.

Note: The author of this article is working with Inknowledge.

For more information, please visit our official website Inknowledge Inc. You can also contact us at info@inknowledge.com.