How to Manage Your Grant Proposals with Grant Tracker

Grant Tracker is designed to make the grant management process a breeze! It’s like having a personal assistant to help manage your grant-related tasks, deadlines, and documents in one neatly organized place, so you can focus on winning those grants!

This article covers:

• What is Grant Tracker?
• How do I install Grant Tracker in my MonkeyPod?
• How do I create a grant proposal in Grant Tracker?
• How do I track a proposal's status?
• How does Grant Tracker help manage proposals once they're entered?
• How do I stay on top of upcoming deadlines?
• What do I do when a grant is awarded?
• What if the grant transaction was already recorded in my MonkeyPod?
• How do I track a promising opportunity before it's ready to become a proposal?
• Can I budget for a grant before I know if I've won it?
• How do I track grant spending?
• What reports are available in Grant Tracker?
• How do I customize Grant Tracker's settings?
• Frequently Asked Questions

What is Grant Tracker?

Grant Tracker is an advanced app that serves as the organizational hub for important items related to your grant proposals. It also has a bunch of great features to help with managing grant proposals and opportunities, working with grant budgets, monitoring the success of your grant writing efforts, recording awarded grants in your MonkeyPod, and reporting on grant spending. With additional features like automated reminders and a centralized dashboard, MonkeyPod's Grant Tracker sets you up for success!

How do I install Grant Tracker in my MonkeyPod?

To install Grant Tracker, choose Apps & Integrations > Fundraising from the main menu. Then select the option there to learn more about Grant Tracker, and click the button to Install. Once installed, Grant Tracker appears in the Apps & Integrations menu under "My Apps & Integrations."

How do I create a grant proposal in Grant Tracker?

To start tracking a new grant proposal, choose Start a new proposal from the Proposal Dashboard.

Step 1: The Basics. Start typing the funder's name in the "Funder" field. Matching relationships from your MonkeyPod appear as you type, and you can select the funder from that list. If the funder doesn't already exist, choose "Create new" to record their details as a new relationship, then select it for this proposal.

Next, enter a title that's unique and informative, since it's used to identify the grant throughout Grant Tracker as well as when an awarded grant is recorded in MonkeyPod. You can always change the title later.

After you've entered the funder and the proposal title, click the checkmark to save the new proposal.

Continue entering the basic information about the grant proposal, including the amount requested, any notes to help you with important details, and any tags for your internal tracking. These details can all be edited later if necessary.  

When ready, click Next: Documents to continue.

Step 2: Documents. Next, choose which documents you want to track for this proposal. These are typically the documents that the funder requires you to submit (like a letter of inquiry, the proposal itself, a budget, or a financial statement), but can include any documents you need to pull together when applying for this grant.  Choosing to track a document here tells Grant Tracker to set up action items for each of these documents to help you assign the work and meet your deadlines.

Select any of your organization's default documents from the list presented, or use the "Other" field to add new ones. (You can customize this list; see How do I customize Grant Tracker's settings? below.)

If you keep an online folder (like Google Drive or Dropbox) for the proposal's working documents, paste that link in here so all the important information is recorded in one place.

When ready, select Next: Deadlines to continue to the final step.

Step 3: Deadlines. For each document, choose who's responsible for it from the list of people with access to your MonkeyPod. If someone other than the "responsible" person is doing the work, you have an option to enter that detail here as well. One example might be if the grant writer is the responsible person, they might still assign work on the budget to the director or treasurer. (If you need to add someone new, see this article about how to add a new user to your MonkeyPod.)

Next, enter when the document is due (this is optional—leave it blank for now if you don't have a deadline). You can also create an optional earlier internal deadline so the due date doesn't sneak up on you!

Once you've set up assignments and deadlines, your document-related tasks appear together in the proposal's Pre-Submission Tasks tab.

How do I track a proposal's status?

As a grant proposal moves through your pipeline, update its Proposal Status field, found near the top of the proposal page.

The full set of statuses, in order, is:

• Opportunity: a promising lead you're tracking before the funder has released a formal application. See How do I track a promising opportunity...? below.
• Setup Incomplete: the funder has opened the grant cycle and you've started the proposal, but the proposal isn't fully configured yet. Selecting a Setup Incomplete proposal on the dashboard will take you back into the setup wizard so you can finish where you left off.
• Pre-Submission: you're actively working on the proposal ahead of submission.
• LOI Submitted: you've sent a letter of inquiry and are waiting to hear whether you've been invited to submit a full proposal. You may skip this status if it's not applicable.
• Submitted: the full proposal is in the funder's hands. You'll notice a red "alert" triangle here in the status menu if required documents have not been recorded yet as completed.
• Delayed: you started the proposal but won't finish it in time for this cycle, and you plan to pick it back up for a future deadline. Delayed proposals become archived, so they will not appear in your view of active proposals. All open tasks will have their due dates cleared and their status set to "Stuck," so when you restart the proposal, you can pick up with new dates. (To reinstate a delayed proposal, first locate it by viewing archived proposals in the dashboard, selecting the grant title, and then changing the status to Pre-submission.)
• Awarded: You've heard from the funder that you've been awarded the grant. See What do I do when a grant is awarded? below.
• Rejected: the funder declined to fund your grant request.
• Abandoned: your organization decided not to pursue this grant. Marking a proposal Abandoned automatically archives it. To reinstate it:  use the status filter on the Proposal Dashboard to view the "Archived" proposals, select the title of the proposal, and then choose the appropriate status from the status menu. Choosing an earlier status will also change it from Archived to Active status.

How does Grant Tracker help manage proposals once they're entered?

The Proposal Dashboard lists all the grant proposals you've entered. Use the filters at the top to narrow the list by any of the following criteria: Active or Archived Proposals, Status, Funder, Deadline, Tag, or a free-text search by title or funder.

As you filter the list, the summary information will update to include totals for all the relevant proposals.

Click any column header (Proposal, Next Deadline, Ask Amount) to sort by it.   Click a proposal's title (or the magnifying glass icon) to view or edit it.

On the proposal page, the summary card shows the details, along with a date that updates as the proposal advances: "Initiated on" before submission, "Submitted on" once submitted, or "Awarded on" (with the awarded amount and a link to the grant transaction) once awarded.

Editing a proposal

To edit a proposal, select Edit proposal from the action menu at the top left of the proposal page.

Tracking proposal status

As the status of a grant proposal changes, update the Proposal Status field. (See above for descriptions of the various statuses.)

Tracking documents and action items

Your proposal's tasks live in its Pre-Submission Tasks tab (and, once awarded, a Post-Award Tasks tab too).

For each task you'll see who is responsible, and who is assigned to do the work (optional), along with the due date, and a count of any attached files or comments. Use the status menu to indicate if the work has begun or has been completed.

Select the expansion arrow to see all the details about a specific document, including comments and attached files:

• Select Edit Details to change any of the information, attachments, or assignments for the document. See this article on action items for more information.
• Select Comments to communicate with other members of your team about the document.  Type @ to view names of other MonkeyPod users in your organization, and select a name to notify that person directly about the comment (@mention).

• Delete: Look for the Delete document link in the lower right to delete the document task along with any related information.

How do I stay on top of upcoming deadlines?

Grant Tracker gives you a few ways to keep deadlines from sneaking up on you.

The Workload tab

For an at-a-glance view of everything on your plate across every grant, check the Workload tab: it pulls every open task into one deadline-ordered list. Filter the list by responsible person, due date, or whether to include archived proposals, and a summary at the top shows your total open items, how many are overdue, and how many are due soon.

Deadlines Roadmap

The Deadlines Roadmap in the Workload tab displays the status of action items related to your proposals, giving you a sense of the workload, or grant writing activity, over time. The Deadlines Roadmap includes all proposals and awards. Hover over any column to see the breakdown of how many items are complete, in progress, or not started. You can also export the chart as an image (SVG or PNG) or export its data as a CSV using the menu at the top right of the chart.

Calendar Sync

You can have MonkeyPod add your document details and related tasks to your own calendar. Choose User Settings from the user menu at the top right of the browser window, select the Calendar Sync tab, and click Activate Calendar. Use the generated URL to subscribe from Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, or any calendar program that supports syncing.

The weekly deadlines digest

Every Monday morning, anyone working on grants gets a summary email of what's due for tasks they're responsible for or assigned to do the work. The message is organized into sections that apply to the recipient: overdue items, items due this week, next week, and in the coming month. Muting reminders on a task removes it from the digest, and archived or delayed proposals are also excluded. You can turn the digest off entirely from your user menu in the top right: select Notification Preferences, and look for the App: Grant Tracker heading.

Email and Notification Center reminders

Separately from the weekly deadlines digest, your MonkeyPod can send email reminders about upcoming due dates for any task in Grant Tracker, and you can also see them in your Notification Center. Choose Notification Preferences from your user menu in the top right, and look for the Collaboration section to control which notifications you get and how far in advance.  

What do I do when a grant is awarded?

You celebrate! After that, come back to the proposal in Grant Tracker and change the Proposal Status to Awarded.

Once you do, you'll see a Post-Award Tasks tab where you can manage the remaining post-award work.

Record a grant transaction

If you want to record this grant as a financial transaction in your MonkeyPod, click the Record now link. MonkeyPod sets up all the necessary accounts for you and records the grant transaction, and displays the link to it and the amount awarded on the proposal's page. You can record the grant as soon as it's awarded, and later record when the payments are received (you don't need to wait until the first payment is received to record it.)

Record any post-award documents

Very often, after receiving an award, there is still additional documentation required, like interim or final reports. Click Add a Post-Award Document to set one up to manage your deadlines and reminders for any post-award documents in the same way you would for pre-submission documents (described above).  Submitting your final report automatically archives the proposal for you.

What if the grant transaction was already recorded in my MonkeyPod?

Sometimes a grant transaction ends up on your books before Grant Tracker catches up—for example, your bookkeeper records the deposit directly while the grant writer hasn't yet marked the proposal as awarded. Grant Tracker makes it easy to connect the two without creating a duplicate.

You can link them from either direction:

• From the proposal, once its status is set to "Awarded", go to the Post-Award Tasks tab, and select the Record now link. Grant Tracker offers you any of that funder's existing grant transactions that aren't yet linked to a Grant Tracker proposal, or you can choose to record a brand-new grant transaction instead.

• From your books, open the Untracked Grants tab, which lists any grant transaction that doesn't yet have a matching Grant Tracker proposal. Using the icons on the row for each untracked grant, you can start a new proposal from it, link it to a proposal you're already tracking, or dismiss it if it's not something you want to track at all. (Dismissing the untracked grant simply removes it from this list in Grant Tracker. It doesn't modify the grant transaction at all.)

Either way, linking a proposal to an existing grant transaction doesn't create anything new on your books—it just connects the two, and the proposal automatically advances to Awarded if it wasn't already. That proposal will now also be included in all Grant Tracker reporting for funding and spending insights.

How do I track a promising opportunity before it's ready to become a proposal?

Sometimes you might want to track a potential opportunity for a grant before it's actually available. For example, if you know that a certain foundation always opens their grant cycle every June, but the formal application isn't posted yet—rather than waiting until you have all the details about the proposal, you can start tracking it right away as an Opportunity.

From the Proposal Dashboard, choose Track an opportunity.

All you need to get started is the funder and a working title for the grant — you can fill in the rest once the funder actually opens the cycle. Optionally, you can also add a soft target deadline, notes, tags, and an estimated ask amount, plus any early reminders you want (for example, a nudge to check the funder's site each spring for updated dates).

The opportunity shows up right in your Proposals list alongside your real proposals, tagged with an "Opportunity" status.

Once the funder releases the application and you have firm dates, just change the status from Opportunity to Pre-Submission (or LOI Submitted, if the funder requires a letter of inquiry first). Everything you've already entered, tasks, notes, and all, carries forward as the starting point for your working proposal, and Grant Tracker walks you through filling in the rest of the setup.

Can I budget for a grant before I know if I've won it?

Yes! Every grant proposal has its own Budget tab, and you don't have to wait for an award to start planning. In that proposal's Budget tab, click Create a budget for this proposal (you'll need Admin or Finance permissions to create one, though anyone who can see the proposal can view the budget once it exists). This gives you a Prospective budget you can edit using MonkeyPod's normal budget screens, just without any spend tracking yet.

Your anticipated income is automatically set to match your ask amount, and stays in sync with it if you update the ask, right up until the grant is awarded. As you build out planned expenses,  the Remaining Unbudgeted amount at the top shows how much of the ask you haven't assigned to a line yet; if your planned expenses add up to more than the ask, that changes to Over-Budgeted Expenses in red so you can catch it early.

Once you record or link a restricted grant to the proposal, the budget automatically converts into a real grant budget: income becomes the actual awarded amount, and spend tracking turns on, whether you built the budget before or after the award. (General operating grants remain just as a plan, since there's no restricted fund to track spending against.)

How do I track grant spending?

For restricted grants, once awarded, a Spending tab appears on the proposal (right after Budget) showing the amount Awarded, how much has been Released to Date, and what's Remaining (which turns red if you've overspent). Below that, a month-by-month chart tracks your remaining grant balance over time, starting at the full award and stepping down as funds are released and spent. If the grant has a defined period, the chart follows that span; otherwise, it runs from when the award was recorded through today.

What reports are available in Grant Tracker?

Download Excel

From the Proposals tab, select Download Excel to export details of the proposals matching your current filters.

Funding Insights

This tab shows your success rate, by count of proposals and by dollar amount, along with static percentages right on the chart so you can screenshot them straight into a board report. These charts count decided proposals only: Awarded and Rejected. Proposals still pending a decision are left out of the percentage entirely, and so are Abandoned proposals. You can filter these charts using the same options available on the Proposal Dashboard, which is handy for comparing success rates by year or by project.

Spending Insights

This tab breaks down your annual grant spending. The "Spending by Month" chart shows spending by proposal or by class; use the menu above the chart to pick a fiscal year, and hover over any column for details.

How do I customize Grant Tracker's settings?

Click the Settings tab on the Grant Tracker dashboard to adjust two organization-wide defaults.

Automatic tagging. Every proposal gets its own tag, named after the proposal, filed under a "Grant Proposal" tag type (see How to Use Tags for details). Turn on Tag action items with the proposal they belong to to have every task Grant Tracker creates for a proposal automatically tagged with the grant name (plus whatever other tags the proposal has at the time). This enables your team to filter their task lists or reports down to one grant, or to grant work in general. Turn on Tag the grant transaction with the proposal it came from to do the same for the grant transaction when you record a new award. (All tags from the proposal will be inherited by the linked grant transaction.) Both settings only apply going forward, when a proposal, task, or transaction is first created; changing a proposal's tags later won't retroactively retag anything it's already produced.

Default documents. Set up separate default checklists for Proposal Documents (offered while a proposal is being written, like a letter of inquiry, the proposal itself, a budget, or a financial statement) and Post-Award Documents (offered after a grant is awarded, like a thank-you letter, grant contract, interim report, or final report). Add or remove items freely: nothing here is required, and a proposal can be created with no documents at all. Changes only apply to proposals created from now on; proposals already underway keep the documents they already have.

Frequently Asked Questions

We contract with a grant writer who is not part of our organization. How much information can they see in our MonkeyPod if we give them access to Grant Tracker?

It's up to you! MonkeyPod offers lots of flexibility with how you define your user roles and permissions. You can create a new role for "Grant Writer" and then choose which specific permissions you want to grant anyone in that role. Then be sure to edit that user account to assign them the new role with the relevant permissions. Check out our article on user roles and permissions for more detail.

Our list of proposals is so long. Can we hide old or declined proposals from our dashboard?

Absolutely. Proposals move out of your default Active view automatically once they're Delayed, Abandoned, or otherwise archived, but they're still there if you want to refer back: just switch the dashboard filter to Archived Proposals (or Active and Archived, to see everything at once). You can restore an archived proposal by changing its status back to an earlier one from the status menu. With pagination, sorting, and the filters described above, even a long list stays manageable.

You can also manually archive any proposal using the archive icon for any proposal on the Proposal Dashboard.

You can also un-archive an archived proposal using the restore icon.

Is there an easy way to duplicate a proposal if I'm applying to the grant again in a subsequent year?

Sure! If you reapply to the same funder every year, you can duplicate a proposal instead of starting from scratch. Choose Duplicate proposal from the action menu in the top left of a proposal page. It copies the title, funder, ask amount, responsible person, notes, and document checklist into a brand-new proposal (with fresh, undated tasks) in Setup Incomplete status, ready for you to update with this year's details.