Grant Manager is most commonly used as a shadow accounting system. Just like an individual keeps a checkbook registry to balance his/her checkbook periodically against bank statements, so do most university departments keep their own "checkbook registers" to make sure that their accounts are handled accurately by "the bank", i.e. their institution's main accounting department.
However, because balancing university accounting is a much more complex task than balancing an individual checking account, many things can and do go wrong in the main accounting department. Overhead and fringe calculations may be off on individual transactions, wrong accounts may be accidentally debited for some salaries or purchases, credits and transfers may lose their way from point A to point B, etc.
Automatic Indirect Cost Calculations, Powerful Reporting Options
This is where Grant Manager can be of tremendous assistance. For example, you can tell it exactly how much to charge overhead and fringe for each category in each account, and where to make exceptions. As you work, Grant Manager automatically calculates overhead and fringe costs and generates the proper transactions automatically and transparently in the background.
You can capture all of your expenditures, credits, transfers and other transactions, and generate real-time, clear, complete and easy-to-read reports on various levels of detail. These reports help you analyze end project expenditures, as well as catch possible errors. Many Grant Manager users have told us that they have saved their departments significant sums of money with Grant Manager over time. The easy-to-use yet powerful Grant Manager reconciler helps accountants pinpoint errors or discrepancies between the University ledger and departmental accounting very quickly and easily, and make necessary corrections or discrepancy reports immediately from within the reconciler.
Cost Centers, Inventories, Spending Analysis
Grant Manager's functionality goes well beyond shadow accounting. You can use it to keep track of inventories and capital equipment; track received status on any shipment down to the line item level; print purchase orders and other transaction forms from scratch or onto your institution's pre-printed forms; keep track of expenditures on account-independent cost center levels; analyze trends and make spending and account status forecasts well into the future; publish reports on your intranet or the web; and perform many other tasks.
Multi-User Ready
Multi-user capability allows many people to work on the same database at the same time, while Grant Manager manages record locking and other network -related issues in the background. With additional network licenses you can easily add as many concurrent users as necessary to the system.
State of the Art Technology
Grant Manager is built on the Microsoft VFP database technology, which assures fast and stable operation on all Windows platforms, from Windows 98 to Vista and beyond. Internet connectivity is built into the program, making it easy for you to send reports and forms as email attachments (PDF, MS Word, RTF, HTML, Excel Spreadsheets, etc.). You can also go to vendor web sites directly from within the program, and publish your reports on the web with a few mouse clicks.
Reporting and searching data is easy with the built-in report generator, which allows you to run standard reports and also create and save your own report templates from the intuitive "point-and-shoot" reporting environment.
Hosted Application Option
Northern Lights Software provides optional application hosting on our own secure servers. This enables you to run Grant Manager on any Windows, Mac, Linux or even Windows –based PDA/Smartphone –platform that supports Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari –browsers. Using the hosted option means that you don’t need to install any software or maintain, backup or update your Grant Manager program. All you need is a browser in order to access your program and data from any computer, from anywhere, at anytime. Click here for more information on our Galaxy Hosting.
To learn more, view our product introduction video, get hands-on experience with the free, fully functional Grant Manager evaluation version, and talk to other Grant Manager users at or near your institution. We will be happy to provide references upon request.