Grants Management System

The Vendor is required to provide a software solution to streamline and enhance our department’s ability to manage and track local and federal grants and funding programs as part of the city ongoing efforts to improve its grants management and grant administration processes.
- The Grant Management System (GMS) will be a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that shall have the ability to manage grants and funding programs, track progress of related activities, and process various types of programs with differing workflows.
- The solution shall also have a public facing portal where grant recipients external to the city are able to manage information, submit applications for funding and related documents, execute agreements, submit requests for payments, and provide outcomes and data including grant closeout information.
- Grant agreement administration and reporting and reimbursement processing is currently done via cloud-based Microsoft programs (i.e. Excel, Word, and SharePoint) and SeamlessDocs.
- The SaaS solution shall have the functionality to manage the reimbursement packet workflow (including, but not limited to: tracking status, routing to multiple reviewers through approval stages, and logging all defined financials and data), track and manage grant-related contracts, store and organize grant related documents, track budgets and expenditures, and provide reports on program Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) including, but not limited to: businesses served, trees maintained, event attendance, and percent of budget expended.
- A system with minimal configuration to meet consistent grant management life cycle workflow management across multiple programs.
- An intuitive user interface that allows for easy system navigation for public and external users with varying levels of digital literacy.
- Compliance and alignment with State and Federal regulations, mandates and reporting needs.
- Integrated user-friendly query, reporting and dashboard tools.
- Seamless end-to-end cycle for each grant from application through close-out with both programmatic and fiscal reporting.
- Robust user role and system administrator functionality.
- Integration with third-party providers and software such as SAP, MS365, and Adobe.
- Ongoing support and maintenance should be explained, both for the programmatic and technical (IT) user perspective.
- The SaaS solution shall allow internal users to flag budget category discrepancies, allows external users to correct and resubmit materials, and will correctly recalculate new totals based off of the finalized information.
- The SaaS solution shall have the ability to host a directory of templates for downloading by external users and templates that can be updated by certain designated users.
- The SaaS solution shall generate real time budget to actual expenditures; remaining balance, projected spend and tracks burn rate or percentage of budget utilized.
- The SaaS solution shall have the functionality to create visual analytics reports (pie charts, bar grafts, trend lines) that can be changed at the individual user level based on a variety of data fields (organization-wide, program-wide, etc.) that can be exported to PowerPoint, Word, and Adobe.
- The SaaS solution shall allow internal users to see real-time data with ability to customize what data is shown. Shows financial reporting across all approved grants for a program by fiscal year, by contract, organization, or vendor.
- The SaaS solution shall have the ability for an external grant recipient to initiate a workflow request (such as budget revision, etc.) with communications captured within the record audit.
- The SaaS solution shall have audit log functionality that complies with Federal funding guidelines and regulations (specifically HUD).
- The SaaS solution shall provide City staff and auditors with the ability to view log of changes made to a record.
- The SaaS solution shall be able to pull report of all emails related to a project, program, organization or system wide.
- Sources of data that need to be migrated into the selected system include, but are not limited to, individual project files hosted in Microsoft SharePoint, Seamless Docs and Salesforce backed programs.
- Testing grant applications, scoring rubrics and workflows before each funding opportunity is made available shall be achievable with internal users.
- License Transfer. Solution licensing must be easily transferred by a City administrator, should the need occur (e.g., member of staff leaves the organization).