The More the Merrier? 5 Steps You Need To Know When You Have Multiple Grants

September 19, 2024

Multiple grants require diligent and planned monitoring to ensure that funds received are expended and then reported to the appropriate agency. as the various funders require.

Multiple Grants: Is Your Head Spinning?

Here are a few examples:

You must ensure that expenses are tracked and claimed only once.
Time and effort must be assigned to specific projects and meet the organization’s requirements for each grant awarded.
Different grantors often have additional reporting requirements and forms for the reports they use to monitor the grantee’s compliance.

Step 1: Get Started the Right Way

When an organization receives an award, there are several actions to take to get started the right way:

Review all materials about the award
Create a reporting calendar according to the schedule dictated by the grantor.
Maintain a master calendar that includes deadlines from all grantors.
Assign a team leader or administer each grant.
Alert fiscal personnel to ensure policies and procedures that reduce the risk of misuse and direct theft of funds are in place and regularly monitored.

Step 2: Ensure People Know the Requirements for Federal Grants

Education and communication are the keys to administering multiple grants in ways that ensure compliance with individual grant requirements. Here are a few key points:

Fully train all staff working with the grant.
Communicate time and effort reporting requirements to individual employees. For example, a single employee’s time and effort throughout the day may often require their timesheet to indicate the duration of time and effort that employees worked on different projects.
Perform periodic, regular, scheduled reviews of project budgets, including due diligence, to discover any omissions or errors where expenses have been misapplied among multiple grants.

Step 3: Appoint a Grant Administrator

In the instance of multiple grants, consider assigning responsibility to:

Oversee administration of individual grant teams or administrators
Review fiscal reporting of each grant
Discover discrepancies or misreporting of how funds have been expended and report to each grantor.
Ensure all milestones specified in individual grants are met and reported to the grantor as required.

Step 4: Maintain a Grant Master File

Demonstrate compliance and assist with implementation by creating a fully maintained grant master file that includes the following:

The original RFP or NOFO
The award letter
The final approved budget, scope, and work plan
All monitoring reports; and meeting minutes
Financial and narrative reports required by the donor
Communication log
All other documentation related to meeting project milestones and goals
All forms required by the grantor

Without a complete and current file for each grantor, it is impossible to coordinate multiple grants to facilitate compliance within each grant awarded.

Step 5: Develop Ways Track and Communicate Early and Often

Each grant will require the development of appropriate tracking tools and data management. Grantees should communicate regularly with each funder’s program officer and contact them with questions regarding the impact of another grant’s requirements to avoid non-compliance.

Managing Multiple Grants: You can do this!

It is possible to manage all the many details with your grants effectively. Following these five steps will help your organization avoid the pitfalls of managing multiple Federal Grants.