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Grant Compliance and Award Terms Register
Send the executed award agreements, get every obligation tied to the clause that creates it, and which planned costs need written permission first.
River's Grant Compliance and Award Terms Register reads your executed agreements and returns one row per obligation, each carrying the clause it came from. Reporting duties, prior-approval triggers, allowable cost restrictions, property records and monitoring duties land in the same sheet, sorted by award and sitting beside the reporting calendar each agreement generates. Then your planned actions get tested against every award at once, so the answer to may we do this arrives before the cost is incurred.
Unlike a compliance calendar, which holds the dates and nothing else, this starts from the obligations that have no date. A prior-approval requirement does not fire on a deadline. It fires when somebody decides to buy something, move money between budget categories or change who runs the programme, and that decision usually gets made in a room nobody brought the agreements to. Dates are the tractable part of compliance. The register exists for the two thirds of the terms a calendar cannot hold.
This is for the finance director carrying six or seven awards with one bookkeeper. It is for the executive director who signs a purchase order without knowing which agreements it touches, and the grants manager who inherited a portfolio and never read the terms end to end. Use it when a new award arrives, before a board decision that changes spending, and in the month before a period of performance ends. The next award gets added to the sheet rather than triggering a fresh read of all seven.
What award terms actually oblige you to do
Grant compliance gets run as a reporting problem because reporting is the part with dates on it. The obligations that produce disallowed costs mostly have no dates at all, and two are worth knowing by number. A 25 percent reduction in the approved project director's time and effort over the period of performance needs prior written approval, and so does moving any amount whatsoever out of participant support costs into another budget category. There is no dollar floor on the second one.
Millrace Youth Alliance holds seven awards worth $1,436,000, of which $1,069,000 is federal and $284,000 of that arrived as a subaward. One board decision carried five planned actions: the effort cut, a $9,400 laptop cart, a partner not named in the application, a 90-day no-cost extension, and $18,000 out of participant support. Tested against all seven awards that is 35 separate questions. Twenty need prior written approval, five are not possible under the award at all, and ten need nothing.
Two details decide more than they look like they should. Your role sets the closeout clock, because a recipient files final reports 120 calendar days after the period of performance ends and a subrecipient files at 90, which puts Millrace's two subawards 30 days earlier than a flat rule says. And your own capitalisation policy decides whether that $9,400 cart is equipment. At a $5,000 threshold it is, costing $1,410 of indirect recovery and needing permission. At $10,000 it is supplies.
How it works
Send the agreements
All of them, with attachments and any award terms the funder issued separately rather than in the agreement.
Clauses become rows
Reporting, prior approval, cost restrictions, property and monitoring, each tied to the clause and page it came from.
Test the planned actions
Each planned action checked against every award, with the ones needing written permission separated from the rest.
Keep it in chat
Add the next award as it arrives, or ask what a purchase touches against the budget you committed to.
What you get
- Every obligation as its own row, carrying the clause and the page it was read from
- Closeout dates computed from each award's own period of performance and your role on it
- One planned action tested against every active award, not just the award you thought of
- Prior-approval triggers held separately from deadlines, because a trigger fires on a decision
- The purchases your capitalisation policy turns into equipment, with the indirect recovery each loses
- Obligations that conflict between two awards, named as a pair rather than as two unrelated rows
Common questions
Isn't this what a grant compliance calendar does?
A calendar holds the reporting dates. In the worked example those are 27 of 89 obligations, so a calendar covers roughly a third of what seven agreements require. The other 62 rows are prior-approval triggers, cost restrictions, property records and monitoring duties owed to the subrecipients you fund. None of them fires on a date. They fire when somebody decides something.
Does it tell me whether a cost is allowable?
It names which award's terms restrict the cost and which clause does the restricting, then says whether that clause wants permission before the money is spent. It is not a substitute for the cost principles or for what your auditor will test. Where two awards disagree about the same cost, it quotes both clauses instead of picking one.
What if some of my awards are not federal?
Most portfolios are mixed and the register holds them together. Foundation and state agreements carry their own restrictions, usually fewer and often stricter on one particular thing. In the example the state contract requires permission for an effort change and one of the federal subawards does not, which is the reverse of what everybody assumes.
How does it work out the closeout date?
From the period of performance end date in the agreement and your role on that award. A recipient has 120 calendar days to file all final reports and liquidate obligations. A subrecipient has 90, or earlier where the pass-through entity set an earlier date. Applying 120 everywhere puts two of Millrace's four federal awards a month late.
Can it file the prior-approval requests for me?
No. It drafts the request against the clause requiring it, names who has to sign, and gives you the send-by date, which for a no-cost extension is at least ten calendar days before the period of performance ends. Filing is yours, the same way a portal package is, because the agency wants it from the authorised official.
Does this produce the federal financial report?
No. The register says which reports each award requires and when, and the SF-425 pack builds the figures on one. They are different problems. The register reads agreements for obligations. The report derives eleven accounting figures a general ledger does not hold, then ties every dollar to a voucher.
What happens when a term is ambiguous?
The row says so and quotes the clause rather than resolving it. An ambiguous term is a question for the programme officer, and the useful output is the exact sentence to ask about plus which planned cost is waiting on the answer. Guessing is how a cost becomes disallowed with a paper trail showing you guessed.
Grant Compliance and Award Terms Register
Fill in the form and your workspace opens with the work already underway.