Tracking Government Grants

Allison Mcintyre:

Hello fellow Raiser's Edge users!

 This question is for anyone else who's organization deals with a lot of government grants in addition to their regular donors.

As a higher ed organization, we have been awarded numerous government grants and probably have about thirty or so ongoing grants at any given time. While our Accounting team is primarily responsible for tracking and managing governments grants, we in the Development office like to have a record of the government grants for various purposes. 

Dealing with government grants in RE is tricky. Each new grant that is awarded and each amendment to a grant is entered as a separate pledge in RE. (This has resulted in some government grant records having a very large number of pledges). Reimbursements are entered as "pledge payments." We are considering creating a separate RE record for each grant and linking it as a subsidiary of the larger government organization and soft-crediting the larger government organization in an effort to keep the records a little cleaner. One record in particular has so many pledges and payments on the gift record and so many items on the Media tab that it is very difficult to find information.

How does everyone else handle government grants?  Any advice or insight would be greatly appreciated.

I was about to ask a question about government grants - not this question, but I a glad I saw what you said.

I am about to set up my government funders in our new RE database. we are 97% govt funded so we will have a lot of pledges, too. I will be interested in what response you may get. I hope you get one.

 I am going to look for other RE forums to see what they say, too.

Do you have the Prospect tab?  If you do, each grant submission can be treated as any other proposal you send to a prospective donor.  Enter the proposal in the prospect tab.  You can run reports on what is out there, what has been accepted, how much is pending.  Once the proposal has been accepted (signed and returned to you), you can enter the amount accepted as a Pledge.  When the checks come in they are entered as the Pledge-payment (pay-cash).  If you get a check outright - then enter in as cash without the pledge.  Link the pledge or gift to the proposal to close the loop. 



Without the Prospect tab, it is very complicated to enter these as pledges on the gift tab unless you know for certain what you are getting.  Excel is the only way to manage and keep track of what has been submitted and pending.

We get about 80% of our funding from the congressional appropriation - which puts us at risk of running out of money when the government shuts down!  We record "gifts" (transfers, really) with a gift sub-type of "Wire Transfer/Grant Drawdown" and use the gift type of Cash.  We have a fund number for every grant/program and the donor is whichever government agency is issuing drawdown - USDA, US Dept. of Education, DOD, state agencies, etc.  In the past, we created a new fund number (same fund with a new appendix) for every year's grant/appropriation, and put the entire amount in as a pledge to be drawn against - thus every drawdown, whether by EFT or check, was a type Pay-Cash, sub-type Drawdown or Check as appropriate.  This became too cluttered, so we stopped creating new fund numbers and simply made new pledges.



As someone in this thread mentioned, the Finance office (and in our case the office of Sponsored Programs) is responsible for tracking grants, so we are now discussing not entering them in RE at all.  The Advancement Office really has nothing to do with them, and it's just added paperwork and an additional reconcilliation that needs to happen.  I can see why Advancement might want to know how much is coming in the door, whether connected to their efforts or not, but it does make a lot of extra work with limited returns. We might leave it entirely to the Finance Office and save ourselves the headache.