Power the grant life cycle

The RSM Grants Management System (GMS) is a comprehensive software solution built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. GMS reduces manual staff activities, empowering organizations to spend more time focused on their mission and value-added outreach.

The RSM grants solution is an integral part of Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, a tool designed for grant-making organizations. It leverages the Microsoft Power Platform to provide automated and flexible solutions for any organization that needs to approve and track outgoing funds and integrates with enterprise resource planning solutions for financial processing and reconciliation.

Grantee portal

The grantee portal, built on the Microsoft Power App portals, provides a central location for all constituent activity. It supports grantees through the entire grant life cycle, from planning in the pre-award phases to ongoing reporting on granted funds.

Portal features:

• Tailored grant applications for different categories of grants
• Personalized grantee profiles and self-management
• Demographic surveys
• Submission of required information and documents
• Customized milestone generation and reporting
• Reporting of program metrics and usage of granted funds
• E-signature capabilities and integration with e-sign vendors
• Tracking of disbursed funds

The Power App portals provide a flexible and powerful low-code environment, which can be easily customized for any organization and maintained without developers.

Unleash the Power Platform

Every organization strives to reduce staff time spent on repetitive tasks. GMS utilizes powerful native tools, including Microsoft Power Automate and the Power App portals, to reduce staff workloads and provide great constituent experiences.

• Power portals provide easy access and information to grantees and partners, reducing manual requests to staff.
• Automated scheduling and communications reduce staff time spent on basic funding partner interactions, freeing up critical time for higher-value activities.
• A fully automated approval engine keeps track of approval processes and pushes projects forward through the grant life cycle.

All elements of the system are extremely customizable, allowing organizations to support and maintain their own system.

Due diligence

Vetting potential grantee organizations and verifying ongoing grantee status is simple with GMS. Automated integrations pull data from GuideStar and IRS Publication 78 directly into the system. With this seamless integration, your organization can save time and scale staff by quickly identifying the right partners and grantees.

Fund management, funding flow and reimbursement activity

GMS supports the management of complex co-funded programs in which different departments and teams collaborate to fund and deliver program objectives. The solution allows your organization to make critical data-driven decisions and better understand funding activity. Your organization will be able to:

• Create budgets for any period, with flexible, hierarchical funding structures
• Renew agreements and carry forward funds to future periods
• Manage contractor and consultant payments based on actual project performance
• Automate invoicing and time-based drawdowns
• Generate detailed transaction summaries and fund-balance reports
• Offer a choice of fund distribution through ACH, Zelle or check

360-degree insights into grantee data

Many organizations utilize different systems at various stages of the grant life cycle, leading to disparate and inconsistent data. The RSM grants solution utilizes a single system to track all data and relationships in a consistent way throughout the entire grant-making process. This results in a unified set of data for easy and powerful reporting. Overlaying the system, a suite of customizable Power BI reports provides executive dashboarding and enterprise-level reporting. GMS reporting features include:

• Breakdown of grant activity by grant type and funding source
• Grant activity over time, with year-over-year reporting
• Heat maps showing grant activity by geographic location
• Dashboards of portfolio investment cycles across projects and years

With data sets already in place, creating additional dashboards is simple!

What types of organizations use GMS?

Private foundations

Manage investee and investment pipelines

• Track service providers
• Impact investors

Community foundations

• Donor-advised fund management and applications
• Community funds and initiatives

Charities

• Give out scholarships, grants and loans
• Integrate with Microsoft Fundraising and Engagement for donor activity

Public foundations

• Enforce fund-matching guidelines
• Establish rates for services that carry through into financial reporting