Why tribal governments are upgrading to Sage Intacct for stronger grant management
Federal grants represent an essential funding source for tribal governments. But many tribal entities still rely on legacy grant management software or even basic spreadsheets to handle day-to-day grant workflows.
A modern, cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform like Sage Intacct can help you create a more streamlined, effective grant process than is possible under older systems. This is especially valuable now, when federal regulators are pushing back on grants in all sectors.
Keep reading to learn more about why your tribal government could benefit from implementing Sage Intacct for grant management.
How the world of tribal grants is changing
Under the Trump administration, federal grant money has been increasingly scrutinized or even withheld. This included an early funding freeze that affected tribal entities, a slowdown in grant reimbursements from funding agencies, rejection of allowable grant drawdown requests, as well as a nearly month-long educational grant withholding that may have impacted tribal schools receiving federal funds.
In this new, uncertain political environment, tribal government leaders are understandably wary of any additional restrictions and eager to find new ways to move forward. And many are looking to increased transparency and efficiency as solutions.
The keys to an effective grant management system
An effective grant management software platform is essential to both daily operations and maintaining trust in a grantor-grantee relationship. Here are some of the key components:
- Staying on budget: You have to manage your grants effectively to make sure you’re spending in accordance with your budget, avoiding overspending or underspending and requesting drawdowns in a timely manner.
- Visibility: You want to have a clear understanding of where money is being spent, documentation around spending, details around grant start and end dates, contract numbers, ALN numbers and more.
- Streamlined reporting: From a reporting and compliance monitoring perspective, it’s essential to be able to create quarterly reports or audit reports to make sure things are working appropriately.
How Sage Intacct can modernize your grant management and deliver stronger results
Sage Intacct is a particularly effective cloud-based ERP choice for grant management. Some of the top reasons why include:
1. Multiple options for grant tracking and management
Sage Intacct allows for both simple and more nuanced grant tracking and management. These include:
- Grant dimension: A dimension is an individual record that allows for easy access to reporting on a specific attribute. Using a dimension to track a wide range of grant details reduces the need for hard-coded segment combinations and a flexible chart of accounts. You can put dimensions into groups, create hierarchies and establish controls centered around dimension relationships. This approach often works well for pre-paid or advance-paid grants, or organizations that may not have a large volume of grant activity.
- Grant tracking and billing: This is an add-on module that bolts on top of the grant dimension. It offers expanded capabilities that allow you to flag and count qualified timesheets and expenses, as well as generate detailed invoices. If you’re working with a high volume of grants or frequent drawdowns, this module might be especially useful.
2. Complex or full-cycle grant management
The grant tracking and billing module, which you can add onto the base Sage Intacct, allows you to conduct full-cycle grant management in one place. This is especially useful if you have grants that require regular drawdowns rather than grants that are either fully or partially advance-funded.
- Oversee a larger volume of grants: If you’re a bigger tribal entity administering many individual grants at once, you’ll be better able to keep track of each grant in one place, as well as streamline and automate financial management.
- Avoid expending more than the grant award: Keep your spending in line with your budget by avoiding spending beyond the grant award.
- Integrated invoicing: You can flag specific expenditures as reimbursable to a particular grant and complete a drawdown when needed.
- Manage payroll spending: Payroll is often the largest expense from any grant. Here, you can easily track payroll and related benefits for reporting and reimbursement of these costs.
- Advanced indirect cost allocation capabilities: You can set up allocations inside the system to apply indirect cost charges against multiple grants.
3. Easier grant compliance
Most grant funding comes with strict rules about where and how it can be spent. Sage Intacct makes complying with those rules simpler. From a compliance perspective, benefits include:
- Real-time monitoring: Avoid spending grant money on unallowable costs with real-time monitoring that also prevents overspending.
- Centralized approvals process: Rather than having to handle approvals via email or paper forms, you can manage all approvals from within the system, as well as view invoices to see how money is being spent.
- Data entry controls: You can monitor the budget, including at the individual line item level, plus limit the general ledger accounts so your team can only charge expenses to accounts that are budgeted to a specific grant.
- Reduced errors: Because everything is centralized and visible, you’ll be less likely to make mistakes that could create compliance headaches.
4. Improved grant process and workflow
From a process and workflow perspective, Sage Intacct can also make life simpler for your team. Here are some specific nuances you’d likely find valuable:
- Spend management: You’ll be able to oversee your budget, encumbrances, open purchase orders and how much money you have left to spend. The spend management functionality in Sage Intacct lets you use the system to monitor each line item in the grant and tribal budgets in real-time rather than after the budget is overspent.
- Grant accounts receivable (AR) workflows: Because you can set up separate workflows for reimbursable versus advance funding grants, you can create an grants receivable invoice for a reimbursable grant within Sage Intacct.
- Automated allocations: Automate your entire allocations process, reducing time spent on this work from days per month to minutes and helping keep elements like indirect costs in line with your budget.
How Wipfli can help
We help tribal entities upgrade to custom Sage Intacct solutions to strengthen grant management and other essential processes. Ask our team to assess your needs and work with you to implement a path forward. Learn more here or sign up for our upcoming webinar on grant management strategies for tribal organizations
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