Managing the grants that propel your Non-Profit forward can be a stressful, complex process filled with meetings, paperwork, and deadlines. But it doesn’t have to be so frustrating. You can ensure transparency and support a collaborative environment with access to grant progress data and accurate time tracking for employees.
In this article, you’ll learn the keys to reducing frustrations with grant management by eliminating manual tasks in tracking employee time, expenses, and labor costs.
Key Benefits of Grant Management:
- Avoid Frustration.
- Meet Reporting Requirements.
- Avoid Complications and Penalties.
- Ensure “Audit Proof” accuracy through systems and automation.
Grant management can provide a range of benefits that are essential to your organization’s success. Streamlining data collection and report compilation can help you reduce frustration, track grant performance, and keep stakeholders informed.
Grant management can also help you meet reporting requirements by identifying the information you need to track from the outset and ensuring that you report accurately and comprehensively throughout the grant cycle. Successful grant management includes monitoring expenses–including paid employees’ worked hours and other direct or indirect costs.
Common Frustrations for Non-Profits using spreadsheets, text messaging and email, and paper timecards to track worked hours include:
- Scrambling to compile the report you need for your funder.
- Risk of failing an audit due to human error or lack of consistency and accuracy in calculations
- Risk of losing grant revenue or losing out on future grants due to failure to submit reports in a timely fashion.
Modern Software Solutions Permit Customizing Data Collection Based on Your Needs
If you are still using manual timekeeping methods, then you have experienced how difficult it can be to chase employees down for missing timecard data at the end of the pay period and the associated stress as you rush to total employee hours and break down their hours across grants based on last-minute feedback from the employee and their supervisor.
Many time and attendance solutions offer a generic approach to tracking employee timecard data, but for non-profit organizations with varying employee types and calculation rules (such as exempt, non-exempt, or temporary hires), a customized approach is more suitable. Example options for populating employee timecard data include:
- Manual Punch In and Out with Department and Grant Entry by Employees throughout their workday.
- Provides the highest level of detail.
- Requires employees to transfer between Grants when they switch between different activities.
- Ideal for organizations where Grant Activities vary from day to day.
- Often the best fit for Hourly Employees.
- Punches can be collected from a Web Portal, a Mobile App, or a Biometric Time Clock that hangs on the wall.
- Self Reporting
- Employees can be granted access to their timecards to enter hours worked for each grant activity at the end of the pay period.
- Often a fit for Exempt employees who do not punch in and out.
- Auto Punch to Schedule with Automatic Switching Between Grants.
- Automatically insert In and Out Punches based on the employee’s schedule for a given date.
- Automatically transfer between Grant Activities based on the employee’s schedule.
- Eliminates the need for employees to punch in and out manually while still providing the ability to have Employee Grant Activities vary daily.
- Auto Punch to Schedule with Automated Labor Distribution
- Automatically insert In and Out Punches based on the employee’s schedule for a given date.
- Automatically distribute worked hours between specific grants by a flat pre-set percentage.
InfiniTime can implement the above data collection options for a single employee or a group of employees as needed. This ensures payroll and accounting have the appropriate breakdown of employee hours across Grant Activities while reducing the administrative burden on staff.
Expense Reporting for Grant Tracking and Employee Reimbursement
To ensure direct and indirect costs are captured accurately in addition to labor, Employee Expenses can be entered into InfiniTime under a specific Grant, and related receipts can be attached. InfiniTime transfers employee expenses to payroll as a negative deduction which reimburses the employee for the expense without taxing the amount as income.
Are you ready to end the frustrations of tracking employee timecards and grant activities by spreadsheet, text messaging, email, and paper and recapture your staff’s time to allow them to focus on activities critical to your mission as a Non-Profit?