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
