7 Signs Your Organisation Has Outgrown Its Grant Management System
15th September 2026
5 min read
by Taru Bhargav
You have a way of managing grants. Maybe it is a dedicated grant management system. Maybe it is a spreadsheet that has grown more sophisticated over time. Maybe it is a patchwork of tools that, together, mostly gets the job done.
And that is the tricky part. When you zoom out, everything can look like it is functioning.
Zoom in, and you start to see the work happening around the process: manual follow-up, duplicated information, approvals happening elsewhere, reporting stitched together from different places, and people stepping in to keep things moving.
That does not necessarily mean the way you manage grants is broken. It may simply mean your organisation has grown beyond what the current setup was originally built to handle.
The harder part is knowing when those workarounds have become significant enough to make the case for change internally. That usually happens when isolated frustrations start creating a wider cost for the organisation.
These seven signs can help you recognise when you have reached that point.
1. Spreadsheets are doing more than they were meant to
Spreadsheets are great when they are being used for the job they are good at. Take, for example, tracking a simple list of applicants or keeping tabs on a small set of program data, but when it comes to grant management, that can quickly stretch beyond a single file.
Application data may feed in from forms, automation tools such as Zapier can help move information between systems, documents may live elsewhere, and reporting can end up relying on another spreadsheet or dashboard altogether.
The problem with that approach (even though there are good parts to it) is that it often works best when the people who built it understand how everything connects.
As programs grow and processes change, it becomes harder to rely on a setup that depends on multiple tools or manual connections. The question is not whether spreadsheets still work, because in many parts of the grant process they absolutely do. It is whether your team now needs a shared grant management system that brings applications, workflows, documents and reporting together.
So, if your team is spending more time maintaining the tools and connections around the grant process, especially the spreadsheets and automations holding everything together, treat that as a warning sign that it may be time to invest in a more centralised grant management system.
2. Approvals increasingly depend on inboxes and manual follow-up
Grant administration already comes with plenty of operational pressure. Across ANAO performance audits conducted between 2020–21 and 2024–25, 55% of grants administration audits received a negative conclusion, while 23% received the most serious “adverse” conclusion, the highest share recorded across the activities it assessed.
So what happens when approvals, assessments, and handoffs are also being managed manually?
Sarah James, Product Manager at Tactiv, has seen this firsthand:
"What we hear often from organisations exploring our software is that it's the blind spots that worry them most, the assessment nobody logged, the sign-off that happened in a hallway instead of within a process. Those are the moments that turn into adverse findings, and nobody knows they're there until an audit goes looking. Every stage of the grant lifecyclemanaged in one platform solves this."
If we connect the dots, it is safe to assume that existing issues around governance, consistency, and oversight become even harder to manage when key parts of the process rely on emails, manual follow-up, or disconnected workflows rather than being captured within the system itself.
Ultimately, if the person coordinating the process stepped away tomorrow, could anyone else open the system and immediately understand where each application sits, what has been approved, and what needs to happen next?
If that visibility depends on one person’s knowledge rather than the system itself, it is a strong sign that your current setup may no longer be fit for purpose.
3. Reporting requires too much manual work
There is a difference between having the data and being able to use it. In most organisations, the information exists somewhere, but the real test is how easily you can get from a question to a reliable answer.
If leadership asks how much funding has been committed, which grants are waiting on approval, or which milestones are overdue, are you prepared to answer?
One way to test that visibility is to look at the questions your team needs to answer regularly, and how much work sits between the question and the answer.
|
If the question is… |
A usable system should let you… |
Where things start to break down |
|
How much funding has been committed? |
See it from current grant records |
Multiple files need to be reconciled |
|
What is awaiting approval? |
View status and ownership |
Teams need to check inboxes or ask around |
|
Which milestones are overdue? |
Filter and report directly |
A separate tracker is maintained |
|
What happened with this grant? |
Follow the grant history in one place |
The answer has to be pieced together from emails and documents |
As you can see, if straightforward questions require that much manual work, the issue is bigger than reporting alone.
Moreover, if the same questions come up every month and your team is still facing the same challenges, it is a clear sign that your reporting process is no longer keeping pace with the way the organisation operates.
4. Different grant programs are creating separate systems and workarounds
Not every grant program looks the same, which means your system needs to handle those differences without creating extra work. For example, a community grant might have a simple application and assessment process, while a larger multi-year program may need more eligibility checks, several reviewers, staged approvals and more detailed reporting.
The problem starts when every variation creates another workaround. A new funding stream might mean a separate spreadsheet for assessors, approvals managed over email, or even another system because the current setup cannot support the process easily.
If that keeps happening, you lose a clear view of how grants are managed across the organisation. The issue is not that programs are different; it is that your current setup is not flexible enough to support those differences without adding more tools and processes.
That is where configurability matters: different eligibility rules, assessment models, approval paths, milestones and reporting requirements should be able to sit within the same underlying system.
5. Your team is becoming the help desk for the grant process
Funders are increasingly recognising that the administrative burden placed on applicants matters.
In 2025, Exponent Philanthropy reported that 62% of funders had streamlined their application requirements and 58% had simplified reporting requirements, with reducing the burden on nonprofits one of the reasons behind those changes.
But there is another side to that burden.
When applicants struggle to submit information, work out what is required, respond to requests, or understand where their application sits, that friction often comes straight back to your team through emails, follow-ups, and documents being sent outside the intended process.
The same applies to external assessors who need help accessing information or completing their part of the workflow.
Where are people getting stuck?
- submitting the right information
- understanding what is required
- responding to requests
- checking application or grant status
- completing post-award reporting
- accessing information as an external assessor
Good service will always involve human interaction, and that should not disappear, but the bigger issue is when your team becomes the intermediary for routine parts of the process that should be straightforward.
If staff are repeatedly explaining the system, chasing information or moving documents back into it on someone else’s behalf, you are no longer just supporting stakeholders; you are compensating for the way the process has been designed.
6. More applications are creating disproportionately more administration
More applications will naturally create more work. The question is whether your administration is increasing at the same pace, or whether each new round also creates more manual eligibility checks, assessor coordination, status emails, reconciliation, and data handling.
In our experience, this is often where older or heavily customised setups start to show their limits.
They may have worked perfectly well at lower volumes, but scale changes the economics of every manual step. What takes a few minutes across 50 applications becomes a material workload across 500.
This is where a purpose-built grant management system should make a difference.
Rather than adding more people or more workarounds as volumes increase, it should help standardise repeatable parts of the process such as eligibility checks, assessment workflows, reviewer allocation, status tracking and reporting, while leaving the judgement-heavy parts of grantmaking with your team.
7. You can report what you funded, but struggle to see what it achieved
And finally, there is one part of grant management that gets talked about a lot but is still much harder to do well: understanding what happened after the funding was awarded.
Most organisations can report the number of grants awarded, dollars distributed, recipients, locations and program status, but bringing together milestones, progress and outcome information is often a different story.
The ANAO specifically recommends that grant programs use outcomes-focused performance measures and determine the intended change a grant is expected to create, then measure and evaluate the actual outcome.
The challenge is that if those updates are sitting across narrative reports, PDFs, spreadsheets, emails and separate evaluation tools, the information may exist without being easy to compare or use.
That distinction becomes clearer when you separate what is easy to report from what usually takes more work to bring together. Here are a few scenarios:
|
Easier to report |
Harder to bring together |
|
Grants awarded |
Progress against milestones |
|
Funding distributed |
Program performance |
|
Recipients and locations |
Outcomes reported by recipients |
|
Current grant status |
Patterns across a funding portfolio |
This is where the role of the grant management system becomes more important.
It should not claim to measure impact for you, but it should make it easier to consistently collect, organise and retrieve the information you use to assess performance, with milestones, progress updates and outcome reporting connected back to the relevant grant and program.
When does this become a business case, not just a grants-team frustration?
If you have read this far, you probably already know where your current setup is starting to strain. The bigger challenge is making the case internally, because changing a grant management system comes with investment, implementation, training, and a learning curve for the people who will use it.
That is also why the answer is not simply to replace one tool with another. The stronger case is to show where current limitations create wider operational costs, then use that to assess whether a more purpose-built grant management system would solve the problems you are actually experiencing.
If you are seeing several of the following, you have a much clearer basis for that conversation:
-
Staff time is being absorbed by workarounds such as spreadsheets, manual reconciliation or maintaining connections between different tools.
-
Approvals and handoffs rely too heavily on individual knowledge, inboxes or follow-up rather than a consistent workflow.
-
Routine reporting still requires substantial manual work, even when the same questions come up month after month.
-
New programs or funding streams require new systems or side processes because the existing setup cannot accommodate the variation.
-
Applicants and assessors need staff support for routine process tasks that should be straightforward to complete.
-
Higher application volumes are increasing administration disproportionately, rather than being absorbed by the existing process.
-
Leadership can see what was funded, but getting a clear view of program performance or outcomes is much harder.
The more of these issues you can connect to staff capacity, visibility, governance and program delivery, the less the conversation becomes about buying “better software”. It becomes a question of whether the organisation now needs a system that is purpose-built for the way it manages grants today.
This is where Tactiv’s grant management software comes in. We help organisations bring applications, assessments, approvals, reporting and grant lifecycle management into one configurable system, while still allowing different programs to follow the workflows, rules and reporting requirements they need.
For teams that have outgrown spreadsheets, disconnected tools, or heavily customised setups, that means less time maintaining the process around the grants and more visibility across the funding portfolio itself.
If that sounds like where your organisation is heading, book a demo with Tactiv to see how we can support your grant program.
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