How to Move Your Grant Management Off Spreadsheets (A Practical Guide)

You can move your grant management off spreadsheets without a big-bang migration, a long IT project, or a frozen programme cycle. The most practical approach is to start your next grant round in a dedicated system, keep your existing spreadsheets as a reference archive, and migrate historic data at your own pace once you are confident the new system works. Most organisations that have made this move report that the actual switch took far less effort than they expected — the hardest part was deciding to start.

This guide covers what actually breaks when spreadsheets are used at scale, why most organisations stall despite knowing they need to change, what a grant management system genuinely offers, and how to move across without disrupting live programmes.

Where Spreadsheets Break Down for Grant Management

Spreadsheets are good at storing rows of data. They are not good at managing a living programme with multiple stakeholders, compliance obligations, and sequential workflows. The problems tend to emerge in three waves.

At around 20 active grants, the first cracks appear. Version control becomes unreliable when two people edit the master workbook on the same afternoon. The application tracker, the due diligence log, and the monitoring schedule are in three different files, linked by nothing except a shared grant reference. Email and spreadsheet start to diverge — a grantee sends an updated monitoring report, it is acknowledged in email but never recorded in the tracker.

At around 50 active grants, the system is genuinely fragile. There is usually one person who "owns" the spreadsheet and understands its logic. When that person is absent or leaves, the programme is operationally vulnerable. Reporting to trustees or a grants committee requires hours of manual aggregation that is already out of date by the time it is presented. Due diligence is inconsistently documented — some grantees have a full compliance record, others have a note saying "checked, all fine" with no evidence. OFSI sanctions screening may be happening but no one is recording it in a way that would survive an audit.

At around 100 grants, the spreadsheet approach has usually created structural problems that are difficult to fix without starting again. Grant data exists in multiple places. Staff who joined in the last two years do not know the full history of the files. Monitoring reminders are managed through a combination of spreadsheet conditional formatting and personal calendar alerts. Adding a new programme to the existing structure feels like major surgery.

The failure modes are predictable: missed monitoring deadlines, duplicate grant references, decisions that were made but never formally recorded, and the chronic background anxiety of knowing that the system is held together by a few people's institutional knowledge.

Why Organisations Stall

The technology is rarely the barrier. Organisations stall for reasons that are almost entirely about change management, internal politics, and cognitive load.

"We'll do it when things are quieter." Grant programmes are cyclical and deadline-driven. There is never a quiet moment. This reason is often genuine — no one wants to disrupt a live round — but it becomes a reason to delay indefinitely unless someone sets a specific target: the next round will open in the new system.

"We'd need to migrate all our historic data first." This is the most common misunderstanding. Historic data from completed grants is a useful archive, not an operational requirement. You do not need five years of closed grants in a new system before it is useful. You need this year's active awards, current grantee details, and live monitoring commitments. Everything else can stay in the spreadsheet as a read-only record.

"What if we lose something?" The spreadsheets are not going anywhere. A parallel-running approach — where the new system handles new activity while the spreadsheets remain accessible — means nothing is deleted or discarded. The archive remains intact.

"The team is used to the current system." This is a legitimate concern. People who have built competence in the existing setup — however imperfect — face a genuine learning curve. But modern grant management platforms are designed to be intuitive, and the time investment in learning a new system is typically recovered within the first grant round through reduced manual work.

"The board/senior management haven't approved the budget." This is where a free tier changes the conversation. If the first step is "sign a contract and migrate everything," the approval barrier is high. If the first step is "set up a free account and run the next round in parallel," the barrier is low enough that one person with operational responsibility can often just begin.

What a Grant Management System Actually Does That Spreadsheets Cannot

It is worth being honest here rather than overselling. A grant management system is not transformative in every respect — for small, simple programmes with a handful of grants, a well-maintained spreadsheet may genuinely be adequate. What a dedicated system provides is:

A single source of truth. Applications, due diligence records, assessment notes, grant agreements, monitoring reports, and payment records all live in one place, linked to a single case record. There is no synchronisation problem because there is nothing to synchronise.

Built-in workflow. The system knows that a grant in the "under assessment" stage needs a due diligence check before it moves to award, and that an award needs an agreement before the first payment is triggered. Stages and tasks are structured rather than tracked manually.

Automated compliance checks. UK-built platforms like Plinth run Charity Commission registration checks, Companies House lookups, and OFSI sanctions screening automatically — creating a timestamped audit trail for every check rather than a manual note.

Grantee-facing tools. Applicants submit through a portal. Grantees submit monitoring reports through a portal. This is not possible in a spreadsheet — it requires email, which means the data lives outside the system unless someone manually imports it.

Reliable monitoring reminders. Automated reminders to grantees before report deadlines, without anyone having to maintain a calendar or conditional formatting.

Portfolio visibility. Searching across all active grants by theme, geography, grant size, or monitoring status takes seconds rather than requiring manual filtering across multiple files.

What it does not do: replace strategic judgement, write your criteria for you, or eliminate the need for experienced grants officers. The human work of assessing applications and managing grantee relationships remains unchanged. The administrative scaffolding around that work becomes dramatically less effortful.

The Parallel-Running Approach

The safest way to migrate is not to migrate at all, initially. Instead, run a new grant round in the new system while your existing grants continue to be managed in your spreadsheets until they close out naturally.

This means:

• Any grant applications received from the next opening date go into the new system, from intake through assessment, award, and monitoring.
• Active grants that were awarded under the old system continue to be managed in the spreadsheets until they complete.
• As those grants close, they become part of your archived record. You can import summary data into the new system at any point if you want consolidated reporting, but you are not obliged to.

Within twelve months of adopting this approach, the majority of live activity will be in the new system. The spreadsheets will have gradually transitioned from operational tools to reference archives. The migration has happened organically, without a cut-over date and without any period when your operational data is at risk.

The key discipline is to resist the temptation to keep the spreadsheet updated "just in case." Once a grant round is open in the new system, that system is the master record for everything in that round.

What Data You Actually Need to Move

The instinct to move everything at once is understandable but counterproductive. In the first year, you need to migrate three categories of data:

Active grants and current grantees. Any award that is live — where money has been paid or is due to be paid, and where monitoring obligations are outstanding — needs to be in the new system so you can manage those commitments properly. This is usually a manageable number even for organisations with long programmes.

Current applicant contact details. If you have applicants in a current or upcoming round, their contact information needs to be accessible in the new system.

Live monitoring commitments. If grantees are due to submit reports in the next six months, those deadlines need to be in the new system so reminders can be automated.

What you do not need to migrate in year one:

• Completed grants from previous years
• Declined applications
• Historic correspondence
• Aggregated reporting data from previous rounds

That information is safe in your spreadsheets. Import it when it is useful — for example, when you want to run portfolio analysis across multiple years — not as a precondition for starting.

How Long It Realistically Takes to Get Up and Running

The honest answer is: faster than almost everyone expects, once the decision is made. Below is a realistic timeline for an organisation moving to a new grant management system using the parallel-running approach.

Total time to operational readiness for a new round: typically two to four weeks. Total time to fully migrate away from spreadsheets: six to twelve months, but without any operational disruption because the old system and new system run in parallel throughout.

What to Look For When Choosing a System

If you are a UK-based foundation, trust, or local authority grant team, the criteria that matter most are:

Ease of setup. Can a non-technical grants officer configure the system, or does it require an IT project? Avoid platforms that require a multi-month implementation engagement before you can run a round.

Free tier. The most useful signal that a platform is genuinely suitable for your scale is whether they offer a free tier that lets you start without a procurement decision. Plinth and some other platforms offer this. It means you can test the system with a real round before committing.

Grantee portal UX. Your applicants and grantees will interact with the platform directly. A portal that is confusing, inaccessible, or not mobile-responsive creates support burden and disadvantages less-resourced organisations. Test the applicant journey yourself before committing.

UK compliance built in. Platforms built for the UK market have Charity Commission, Companies House, and OFSI checks integrated. Platforms built primarily for the US market may require workarounds or additional tools for UK compliance obligations.

AI-assisted assessment. Some platforms — including Plinth — use AI to summarise applications against your criteria and draft reviewer notes. This is genuinely useful for high-volume rounds but should be evaluated carefully: look for human-in-the-loop design, not automated decision-making.

Pricing that scales. You should be able to start small and grow. Avoid platforms with large upfront implementation fees or minimum contract values that are disproportionate to your programme size.

For a detailed comparison of specific platforms, see our grant management systems comparison and free grant management tools guide.

Common Mistakes During Migration

Trying to replicate the spreadsheet exactly. A grant management system is not a spreadsheet. If you spend the first two weeks of setup trying to recreate every column and formula from your existing workbook, you will end up with a system that is harder to use than the spreadsheet. Start from the system's native structure and adapt it to your needs, rather than forcing it into an existing structure that may itself have been built around spreadsheet constraints.

Setting a hard cut-over date. Declaring that "from 1 April, everything is in the new system" creates unnecessary pressure and risks disrupting live grants. The parallel-running approach removes this pressure entirely.

Migrating too much data at once. Importing five years of historic applications in week one means spending significant time cleaning data that you may rarely need. Import what is operationally necessary now; archive the rest.

Skipping the test run. It is worth running a small internal test — a fake application from a fake organisation — through the full workflow before opening a live round. This surfaces configuration problems when they are easy to fix, not after thirty applications have been submitted.

Not involving grantees in the transition. If your grantees are used to emailing monitoring reports, tell them in advance that submissions will move to a portal. Give them time to prepare and make sure the portal is accessible and straightforward before you require them to use it.

Under-investing in team training. The platform will be used by grants officers, assessors, and potentially trustees or finance staff. Each group needs a brief orientation to their part of the system. An afternoon of structured introductions is worth more than ad hoc exploration.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do we need to tell our current grantees we are changing systems?

Yes, for anything that affects them directly — particularly if you are moving monitoring report submission to a portal. Give reasonable notice and make sure the portal is tested and accessible before asking grantees to use it. For internal changes (how you track applications, how you record decisions), grantees do not need to know.

What if our spreadsheets are very customised — will we lose that customisation?

Some customisation will not transfer directly. Elaborate formula-driven dashboards, custom macros, and ad hoc analysis sheets are specific to spreadsheets. The question to ask is whether that customisation is meeting an operational need that should be met by the new system, or whether it is compensating for gaps that the new system does not have. Most operational needs — filtering by status, tracking payments, monitoring deadlines — are better served by a dedicated system than by a custom spreadsheet.

We have grants managed by different colleagues. How do we handle permissions?

Role-based access is a standard feature of grant management platforms. You can configure the system so that individual grants officers only see their own programmes, assessors only see the applications they are assigned, and senior staff have full portfolio visibility. This is significantly more controllable than shared spreadsheet access.

Can we run multiple programmes with different criteria in the same system?

Yes. Most platforms support multiple concurrent programmes with separate criteria, workflows, application forms, and reporting templates. This is one of the genuine advantages over spreadsheets, where running multiple programmes in one workbook or across multiple linked workbooks creates significant complexity.

Is a free tier really free, or are there catches?

Free tiers vary. Plinth's free tier is designed for smaller programmes and includes the core functionality — application management, due diligence, assessment, and basic reporting — without a time limit. Paid tiers add capacity, advanced features, and dedicated support. The free tier is a genuine way to start without a procurement decision; the limitations are on scale and some advanced features, not on time.

What does Charity Commission integration actually mean in practice?

When an applicant submits their charity number, the system automatically looks up their registration status, registered purposes, trustee information, and filing history on the Charity Commission register. This check is timestamped and saved to the case record. You do not have to manually look up each organisation. Plinth does the same for Companies House (for CICs and other registered entities) and OFSI sanctions screening.

How do we get approval from our board or senior management to make the switch?

The most effective approach is to ask for permission to run one round in the new system rather than asking for permission to migrate everything. The risk is lower, the commitment is smaller, and the case is much easier to make. Starting with a free tier lowers the barrier further — the question becomes "can we try this for the next round" rather than "can we sign a contract and migrate our systems."

Recommended Next Pages

• What Is Grant Management? — A foundational overview of the grant management lifecycle and what good practice looks like.

• Best Free Grant Management Tools — An honest guide to what free and open-source tools can and cannot do, and when to graduate to a dedicated system.

• Grant Management Systems Compared — A detailed comparison of the leading platforms for UK funders.

• How to Automate Due Diligence in Grantmaking — What automated Charity Commission, Companies House, and OFSI checks look like in practice.

• AI Grant Management — How Plinth uses AI to assist assessment, due diligence, and impact reporting.

Last updated: February 2026