Preparing grant usage reports without night shifts
A nonprofit organization produces around 850 grant usage reports a month. Manual data collection causes errors in the finance team.
- Nonprofit
- Accounting
Key metric
Time per grant usage report
4018min
Average processing time per report in the finance team
At a glance
Starting point
The finance administration of a nonprofit organization manages around 240 funding programs with earmarked funds each year. Grant usage reports have to be produced monthly for every program, about 850 reports a month in total. For each report, the team gathers booking data from the ERP, project information from spreadsheets and receipts from a digital archive. A report takes 40 minutes on average, and considerably longer for complex programs. Eight employees thus spend almost all their productive time compiling, checking and formatting these reports.
- 850
- Reports per month
- 40 min
- Time per report
The challenge
Funding conditions require grant usage reports that are on time, formally correct and audit-ready. In practice, for every report the finance team has to filter bookings by funding program and cost type, match receipts, check totals and fill in text fields on purpose, period and special circumstances. Data sits in the ERP, project lists and the document archive, sometimes under different names. Project managers and funders raise questions when amounts or descriptions are unclear. The manual work leads to media breaks, typos and late submissions, which strains relationships with funders and makes internal audits harder.
Typical symptoms in the company
Why this remained unsolved
The organization already used its ERP intensively, but the funding logic lives in Excel lists, emails and the heads of the finance administration staff. A classic reporting project could hardly have covered the variety of funding conditions without modeling every template individually. At the same time, building separate interfaces for each program was too costly. The problem was too fragmented for a large IT project, but too big to keep compensating with overtime. The finance department needed a solution that connects existing data sources, captures rules and still responds flexibly to new funding conditions.
Our solution
The organization introduced an automated workflow for grant usage reports that brings together ERP data, project lists and the document archive. Rules on cost types, periods and reporting obligations are configured once for each funding program. Every month, the workflow creates a draft report: bookings are filtered and aggregated, receipts linked, plausibility checks run and text fields on purpose, special circumstances and deviations pre-drafted. Finance staff only review the suggestions, add expert notes and approve the report. The result is a consistent, audit-proof process that can be adapted quickly to new funding conditions.
Where generative AI comes in
Generative AI understands funding conditions and internal policies written in free text, maps them to the programs and drafts explanations of deviations, special circumstances and the purpose of use. It creates draft text for report fields and notes to project managers, which the finance team only needs to review and adjust.
- Configuration of funding programs with rules on cost types, periods, eligible expenses and required report fields.
- Automated merging of ERP bookings, project lists and the document archive, with clear assignment to funding programs.
- Generated text drafts explaining deviations, special circumstances and purpose of use based on the booking data.
- Plausibility checks on totals, periods and funding conditions, with clear notes for the finance team when something stands out.
- Approval workflow with roles for finance administration and project managers, plus audit-proof storage of the reports.
How the reporting workflow runs
Capture programs
Funding programs are set up in the system with their conditions, cost types, periods and required report fields.
Bundle data
Each month, the workflow pulls relevant bookings from the ERP, project lists and the document archive and assigns them to the programs.
Create drafts
The system calculates totals, checks plausibility and generates draft text for the purpose of use and explanations.
Expert review
Finance staff review figures and text, add notes and resolve open points with project managers.
Approval and filing
Reports are approved, sent to funders and filed in the archive with all receipts in an audit-proof way.
Measured: after six months in production
Period: after six months in production.
| Metric | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Time per grant usage reportKey metric | from 40 to 18 minutes per report (55% less time) | Time tracking before/aftermeasured |
| Overtime in the reporting cycleQuality measure | from 120 to 40 hours per month | Time tracking before/aftermeasured |
| Reports with follow-up questions | Query rate reduced from 25 to 12 percent | System measurementestimated |
Cost-effectiveness
The solution depends on stable interfaces to the ERP and document archive. With frequent system changes or widely varying funding conditions, maintenance effort rises and some of the efficiency gains may be lost.
Integration and operations
Transferability
The approach fits wherever structured financial or usage reports have to be produced regularly from several systems. Combining automated data collection, rule-based aggregation and generated text drafts reduces manual work and errors without replacing professional responsibility. Thanks to the configurable rules, the solution can be transferred to other reporting obligations, for example with different cost types, periods or review logic.
A similar case in your organization? Let’s talk.
Briefly describe your process. We’ll get back to you with an initial assessment of whether the pattern can be transferred, and what it realistically takes.