Grant Lifecycle Management Software

The vendor required to provide grant lifecycle management software for a technology solution that supports the end-to-end lifecycle of grants—from early-stage cultivation and opportunity tracking through proposal development, application submission, award receipt, and compliant award management, reporting and invoicing, and close-out—while improving efficiency, transparency, data accuracy, and cross-departmental coordination.
- Pipeline development and pre-award management
a. Lead capture and pipeline tracking
•    Track prospects, cultivation activities, deadlines, and multi-year engagement histories.
•    Allow customizable pipeline stages (e.g., identify → contacted → under development → submitted → funded → closed).
•    Enable assignment of owners, collaborators, and alerts.
b. Opportunity management
•    Integrate or store opportunity guidelines, RFP documents, and key requirements.
•    Support checklists, go and no-go workflows, and decision memos.
c. Proposal development support
•    Facilitate collaborative narrative drafting, budgeting, and document uploads.
•    Offer version control and audit trails for multiple users.
•    Provide configurable workflows for internal approvals (leadership, finance, legal).
d. Budget and narrative integration
•    Support development of grant budgets with adaptable templates, cost categories, and institutional rate tables.
•    Enable cross-checking of narratives with budget lines.
e. Submission tracking
•    Record submission mode, deadlines, required attachments, reviews, and submission confirmation documents.
•    Auto-generate reminders and escalating alerts.
- Award management and contracting
a. Award intake
•    Centralize all grant-related data and documents and provide flexible, searchable access across the organization to support collective work.
•    Streamline workflows across pre-award and post-award functions.
•    Support compliance and reporting for federal, state, local, corporate, and foundation grants.
•    Provide visibility into pipeline development, proposal status, financial performance, and outcomes that can be adapted to account for institution-specific benchmarks.
•    Reduce administrative burden and manual data entry.
•    Enable long-term institutional knowledge management.
o    Capture award letters, agreements, negotiated budgets, terms, and restrictions
o    Provide structured fields for project start or end dates, funding sources, match requirements, and reporting schedules.
b. Contract and compliance management
•    Store grantor terms, conditions, compliance requirements, and allowable cost rules.
•    Track amendments, modifications, and re-budgeting actions.
c. Internal notifications
•    Trigger automated notifications to relevant units (finance, HR, program leads, procurement).
- Post-award programmatic and financial management
a. Financial tracking
•    Integrate with institutional finance systems
•    Track expenditures, obligations, encumbrances, match contributions, and burn rate.
•    Support both reimbursement and advance-payment grant types.
b. Programmatic tracking
•    Manage deliverables, milestones, KPIs, and narrative progress requirements.
•    Track beneficiary and participant outcomes when appropriate.
c. Time and effort reporting
•    Enable personnel effort certification workflows aligned with federal requirements (e.g., 2 cfr 200).
•    Capture cost-sharing and in-kind contributions.
d. Procurement and subrecipient management
•    Track contracts, vendor approvals, and procurement thresholds.
•    Manage subaward agreements, risk assessments, monitoring, and reporting.
e. Compliance monitoring
•    Provide alerts for upcoming deadlines, spending thresholds, risk indicators, and overdue tasks.
•    Support audit preparation and document retention.
- Reporting and analytics
a. Operational reporting
•    Produce real-time dashboards and reports for:
o    Pipeline status
o    Submission volume and success rate
o    Award portfolio composition
o    Expenditures vs. budget
o    Key performance indicators
o    Track by pi and grant accountant
o    Match tracking
b. Grantor reporting
•    Generate narrative, financial, and performance reports required by funders.
•    Support scheduled, ad hoc, and automated reporting workflows.
c. Compliance and audit reporting
•    Provide audit-ready documentation, logs, and financial summaries.
•    Retain historical data for multi-year audits.
•    Capacity to meet federal, state, and local government requirements for document retention (three to seven years from final report date).
- Close-out management
•    Close-out workflow
•    Guide users through required close-out steps:
o    Final financial reporting
o    Final narrative reporting
o    Equipment disposition
o    Subrecipient final reports
o    Records retention
•    Ensure alignment with federal uniform guidance when applicable.
b. Archiving
•    Securely store final reports, budgets, amendments, communications, and evidence of performance.
•    Enable controlled access for future audits or reference.
- Integrations and technical requirements
a. Integrate with:
•    Finance and ERP (Ellucian banner)
•    HR systems for effort and time tracking
•    CRM (microsoft dynamics)
•    Document storage (e.g., SharePoint, OneDrive)
•    Single sign-on (SSO)
•    Outlook or related communication module
•    Maintain document integrity across word, excel pdf and other formats.
b. Provide:
•    API access
•    Data import and export tools
•    Role-based permissions and data access control
•    Secure cloud hosting (Fed ramp or equivalent preferred for federal funding)
c. Meet security and compliance standards
•    FERPA compliance
•    2 cfr 200 for federal grants
•    Data retention requirements
- Training, implementation and ongoing support
a. Implementation services
•    Project management and implementation plan
•    Data migration assistance
•    Configuration and customization
•    Testing and validation
b. Training
•    Staff training for pre-award, post-award, finance, and program personnel
•    Administrator configuration training
•    Reference guides, videos, and help resources
c. Ongoing support
•    Helpdesk availability
•    Ticketing and response SLAs
•    Quarterly updates and feature enhancements.

- Questions/Inquires Deadline: January 5, 2026