Funders require immediate response to questions and access to documents. You might fear funder check-up calls because you don’t have the information about your grants at your fingertips.
You can gain quick access to data, streamline your workday, and help yourself focus on your organization’s ultimate aim of assisting the community by automating some tedious operations.
Many of the principles found in system automation, which have their roots in lean manufacturing, have recently been more generally embraced by other industries, such as the service and human resources sectors. Automated systems require less human involvement to complete tasks than equivalent manual processes. This enables businesses to eliminate unnecessary jobs, simplify and streamline operations, and give staff members the time to focus on other duties.
Avram Grant is a renowned philanthropist. He provides solutions to organizations so they can improve their performance. In this post, you will find some benefits of streamlining your grant cycle. Keep on reading to discover more about automation in grants.
What Does Streamlining Grant Cycles Mean?
Developers designed a tool to meet your fundraising needs. You need funder reports, constituent updates, annual reports, and your business’s services. Business process automation boosts efficiency in grants by cutting down on time spent on repeated operations. Since it results in lower costs, increased program performance, and eventually direct benefits for constituents, this is enticing for nonprofit organizations. Additionally, automation reduces waste, which enhances manufacturing efficiency and allows for further cost savings.
Benefits of Automating Grant Cycles
Here are some benefits of automation in grant cycles by Avram Grant:
1. Reduce Labor Costs
The biggest budgetary hole for any grant is administrative time. Administrative and indirect costs are frequently not fully covered by grants. Therefore businesses must find additional funds to make up the difference. Grant recipients may save time and money if the administrative burden of managing grants is reduced through automation.
With the capacity to reduce the amount of staff training necessary, grantees can also save money. In the past, training people to perform manual activities could take a while, especially if a high level of precision was required (e.g., time and effort reporting). Although less training is needed for automated procedures, this can reduce overhead costs.
2. Improve Employee’s Safety
There are legitimate physical safety concerns in production. Most safety concerns in the grant sector are financial, moral, and legal hazards rather than physical threats. When operations are automated, you have a methodical technique to assure adherence to internal and external standards, such as legal mandates and federal award restrictions.
3. Reduce Production Lead Time
Technology-based automation enables modification so it can be tailored to your specific needs. Consider your product to be a 990, annual report, constituent update, funder report, or service delivery report. Because automated systems are so versatile and simple to modify, they can help you shorten the time it takes to produce these things. This adaptability is crucial if a requirement forces you to make last-minute changes, such issuing a fresh notice of award.
4. Improve Customer Experience
Updating information for reporting reasons and calculating returns on a cost-per-client basis might become challenging due to rising expectations for greater openness, increased reporting obligations, and a plethora of new—or newly articulated—data categories that will be necessary. Grant reports can be made much easier to administer with the data entry point of service capabilities connected to program systems and the accounting function. Once a change is made in the system, it can be applied to every reporting function.
5. Complete Tasks that Require Automation
Although we might not need the same level of accuracy in the grant sector as in manufacturing, we have rigorous reporting and audit criteria to comply with. For instance, 2 CFR 200 is a specific criterion we must adhere to.
6. Improve Product Quality
Defects will be reduced by automation. Money will be saved, and the production process will be improved if the danger of human error is reduced. The audit is currently the most significant indicator of quality. Automated systems will simplify the auditing procedure.
7. Resolve Labor Shortage Problems
Automation contributes to increased process consistency, reducing the effects of labor shortages or the loss of important employees. You could not have enough employees or staff hours to complete all required work due to a real labor shortage. How would your projects, training, and reporting fare if all of your grant personnel immediately left?
8. Reduce Efforts
To ensure consistency in service delivery, we ensure that every process will go smoothly and behave consistently.
Conclusion
There are various ways to automate processes and employ software to help improve flow and waste reduction. You can better decide what software you’ll require by accurately identifying the tasks and procedures you wish to automate. Workflow, time reporting, client demographics, processing of receivables and payables, and workflow automation are important areas to consider for grant cycle automation. Knowing is the key.
- Your company’s procedures
- What modifications you would like to make
- Which software applications are currently in use at your company?
- What options will the desired improvements and compatibility with your current software?
Do your homework and identify a solution that satisfies your needs before starting to build an automated project.
