Grant Management

Takeaways¶

1. Grant management is critical to project and organizational success, yet doing it well is often overlooked or given a lower priority.

2. Consistency with funders, whether they’re public, foundation, or private, is of utmost importance. Don’t assign grant management to interns, new staff, or temporary staff.

3. Get to know your program officer or grant manager and make their life easy. See number 2: have the same person manage the grant end to end.

4. Create a strong, auditable, and accurate financial accounting system that also automates reporting or is flexible for each funder to create reports from your P&L ledger.

5. Make reporting do double duty. At its worst, reporting can be drudgery. Change that and make reports effective communication tools for your project and organizational successes. Build reporting into your organizational learning and evaluation cycles. Some organizations use their annual report for both public outreach and donor reporting.

Budget¶

Preparing a good budget during the proposal stage makes grant administration easier. A solid budget prevents surprises and serves as a roadmap for managing and tracking resources effectively.

Some common reasons why good organizations and smart people prepare bad budgets include:

• Lack of coordination/disconnect between technical/program and budget/finance (so cost and tech don’t align)

• Costs that are not based on historical or real data

• Most time spent on design/technical, so not enough time allocated for budget

• Activities outlined during the design phase cost more than the money available

After you win a grant, budget tracking is essential:

• Ensures Funds Are Spent as Planned: Aligns expenditures with the approved grant budget and timeline.

• Monitors Progress & Performance: Helps track spending against milestones and deliverables.

• Identifies Issues Early: Flags overspending, underspending, or misallocations before they become problems.

• Supports Accurate Reporting: Provides documentation for financial reports, audits, and funder updates.

• Enables Informed Decisions: Real-time tracking supports smart adjustments and resource reallocation if needed.

Match¶

Match tracking is essential for meeting grant obligations and can be critical for leveraging future grants:

• Meets Grant Obligations: Many grants require matching contributions (cash or in-kind); accurate tracking ensures compliance.

• Provides Verifiable Documentation: Track source, type (cash/in-kind), value, and date of each match with proper records.

• Supports Audit-Ready Reporting: Matching funds must be documented and reportable, just like grant expenditures.

• Demonstrates Stakeholder Commitment: Shows funders that your organization and partners are invested in the project.

• Prevents Disqualification: Incomplete or inaccurate matching fund records can jeopardize current or future funding.

Planning¶

Just as a good budget is connected to financial management and reporting, a solid implementation plan is required for tracking progress toward your project’s goals and objectives. Although you should have fleshed out activities when designing your project and creating its budget, the proposal you submitted often lacks the level of detail project managers need for implementation.

Once funding is obtained, detailed implementation planning produces updated schedules, plans, targets, and systems with enough detail to support effective project implementation. Some organizations call this start-up planning. Detailed implementation planning is closely tied to monitoring, evaluation, and learning.

DIP¶

Why do detailed implementation planning (DIP)? Detailed implementation planning helps ensure a project fulfills its contractual obligations. These include the following:

• Conducting project activities that lead to the delivery of outputs that meet quality standards, are on time, and within budget;

• Using and managing project resources in conformity with budgets and accounting standards and rules; and

• Complying with any relevant conditions of the Award Agreement.

DIPs are usually prepared after a proposal is approved and funded, but before implementation begins. DIPs may be undertaken annually, for the life of the project, or both. If completed for the life of the project, the DIP is still revised and updated annually. DIPs are referred to as annual work plans.

If you use FBA’s templates and guidance to design your project, you will have at least the beginnings of DIP and a project tracking system. FBA created the ProFrame/DIP worksheet specifically to identify CAL FIRE metrics and set associated targets required for the application.

Monitoring¶

Design teams, especially those creating complex, multi-year projects, should consider drafting a MEL plan for their use that also responds to CAL FIRE’s information needs. Chapter 4 Monitoring provides a primer to help you create a MEL plan. When developing a MEL plan, create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time‑bound (SMART) indicators for all your goals, objectives, intermediate results, and outputs.

The e-Civis Grant Portal Goals worksheet, which is used to input project metrics and targets, does not require fully articulated indicators. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to develop such indicators, along with the rest of the MEL plan, to support your monitoring and evaluation work.

Reporting¶

All funding organizations require activity (progress) and financial reports. Complete these reports accurately and promptly. This helps you and your grant organization stay on schedule, meet reporting requirements, ensure transparency with your funding agency, maintain compliance, and support future funding opportunities.

CAL FIRE¶

CAL FIRE usually requires an activity report with every invoice, and prefers them to arrive together. Use this section to track your project milestones and deliverables. Describe your accomplishments and challenges, and highlight any adjustments or improvements you plan to implement. This is a good time to review your approved scope of work and make sure your activities align with your grant deliverables. Submit Activity Reports on a regular schedule (CAL FIRE requires at least one per quarter, not more than one per month).

Financial¶

Financial reporting is where you lay out your costs associated with the activities performed during the reporting period. Provide detailed expenditures by budget category. You would also include any matching contributions you may have that were recorded during the Reporting Period. Please include backup documentation (e.g., receipts, timesheets, and vendor invoices). Financial reports must reconcile with your internal accounting records. Your Financial Report is a summary of what your costs were for your Reporting Period. Don’t forget to stay on track with your grant timeline and budget.

Automation¶

Many software packages manage and automate financial tracking and reporting. Some are better at project management, while others excel at financial tracking. Most focus on small to medium-sized businesses and may offer reporting templates, but they’re typically not relevant to forest product businesses or nonprofits, or they are exceptionally expensive and include many features you won’t use or need.

QuickBooks is a good solution for desktop or online financial management and is well integrated with taxes for businesses and nonprofits. It doesn’t help you manage the project or write reports, but it will export P/L ledgers and other relevant financial information useful for reporting. It requires a subscription, and the software is proprietary.

Miradi is a well-thought-out program planning and project management software. It is available online or as a desktop version and nicely integrates projects from situation assessment, theory of change, results chains, progress tracking, budgeting, and reporting. It has a subscription plan of $350/year (2025), with more if you want to customize report templates. Still, the community, connection to many foundations and nonprofits that adopted the Conservation Standards, and integration of the entire project make it a worthwhile investment if you choose to operate in that system. It is geared more towards nonprofits, however, so it may not be as useful for small business owners.

Markdown-based knowledge management systems such as Obsidian are another project management resource. With plugins such as Hearth that create dashboards (potentially for each of your projects) and are written in Markdown, which is usable across many platforms, you can create a project-management workflow that saves time and keeps you on top of all tasks. Further integration with Base within Obsidian lets you quickly index multiple files and qualitative and quantitative data.

A wise person once said to use programming to automate the boring stuff, and reporting can sometimes be the less exciting part of your work, particularly for large agency grants. Try the Python automation below if you’re comfortable using a command-line interface in a terminal or prefer a DIY approach.

The same Propongo software is also available as a browser-based app you can fill out and then export to Word, PDF, and HTML. This approach means fewer steps to get a consistent report format, and the browser-based version lets you import customized snippets of frequently used language in your proposals or reporting. Although Propongo is limited to proposals and grant project tracking, you may expand it to other repetitive grant management aspects, such as financials and contracting.

(base) C:\Users\yourusername>

(base) C:\Users\yourusername> conda create -n propo python

(base) C:\Users\yourusername> conda env list

(base) C:\Users\yourusername> conda activate propo

(propo) C:\Users\yourusername>

(propo) C:\Users\yourusername> pip install propongo

Best Practices¶

• Use standardized templates provided by the funder–CAL FIRE provides a template for you to use as a payment reimbursement form.

• Keep records organized and audit-ready–always prepare your documents with the thought of an auditor in mind.

• Always communicate with your grant manager about any issues or changes.