You Just Won a Grant
Five steps for the first month after the award letter. What you set up now decides how hard reporting and close-out will be.
Step 1: Read the agreement and list every obligation
Pull out reporting dates, approval requirements, budget flexibility, procurement rules and anything you must pass to partners. Put them in one tracker with an owner for each.
- Create a grant compliance tracker from a grant agreement (How-to)
- Extract Obligations from a Grant Agreement (Prompt)
Step 2: Set up the budget in your accounts
Give the grant its own code, load the approved budget and decide how shared costs will be allocated before the first expense lands.
- Allocate shared costs across grants (How-to)
- Restricted and unrestricted funds (Decision guide)
- Recovering Indirect Costs for Nonprofits (Guide)
- Contingency Budget Template (Template)
Step 3: Decide how you will pass money to partners
For each partner or supplier, decide whether it is a subaward, a contract or a purchase, because each carries different rules.
- Subaward vs contract vs procurement (Decision guide)
- Proportionate partner due diligence checklist (Template)
- Subrecipient risk assessment form (Template)
- MoU vs Partnership Agreement vs Subgrant (Decision guide)
Step 4: Plan how you will track results
Confirm the indicators you committed to, who collects each one and how often, so the first report is not a scramble.
Topic: Program DesignStep 5: Put the first reports in the calendar
Add every report and deadline from your tracker, with internal draft dates two weeks earlier.
- Build a donor report with AI (Playbook)
- Using AI for Donor Reports (How-to)
- Explaining Budget Variances to Funders (Prompt)