A grant is a relationship between two organisations, and in most of the ones we looked at, each side kept its own copy of it. The applicant typed their details into the funder’s form. The funder typed the award into a spreadsheet. The applicant typed the same budget into their own system to spend against it. A year later both sides typed the outcomes into a report, and an auditor asked for all of it again by email.
None of this was anyone’s fault. Each system did its job for the person who owned it. The waste was in between: the same facts, entered four times, drifting a little each time, with the people doing the entering the ones with the least time to spare. Small charities told us the reporting cost more than some of the grants.
The fix was not a better form. It was one record that both sides work from, entered once, with every stage from application to impact connected to it, and the auditor able to read it without an account. That is Grantary, built for UK funders and the organisations they fund. It lives at grantary.co.uk.
What stayed with us was how ordinary the problem was. Nobody had decided to type things four times. The process had simply never been looked at from both sides at once.