The short answer... it depends. If you’re managing less than a handful of grants, most of which are not Federal or State programs, and have never had a problem during a compliance audit, the best answer for you may in fact be a simple home grown Access database or creative combination of Excel and some shared directories. And it’s not uncommon for us to recommend just that to a prospect asking this question. But as grant volume increases, compliance requirements become more involved, and the penalties for mismanagement become more severe, internal controls become critical... both to your organization and to the agencies weighing your grants applications and reviewing your annual audits. GrantNavigator offers internal controls & credibility in a simple and affordable platform.

In a word... yes. We pride ourselves on our pricing policy. Our pricing philosophy is simple:

• The customer should pay only for what they need, and
• Our pricing should reflect our costs, not “what the customer is willing to pay”.

Many of our competitors charge based on arbitrary factors such as the dollar value of your grant portfolio, the population of your city, county or college, or other criteria not tied to actual development or hosting costs.. None of these factors impact the cost of designing, delivering or supporting grant software, and we believe they are therefore inappropriate. Your price depends upon the version of the software you need, the number of licenses you need, and the number of grants managed in the system. We offer fixed prices for larger organizations ensuring that costs don’t escalate with higher grant volumes, and we offer lower “per unit” pricing for smaller organizations with smaller needs. Clients are not locked into one model and may move up and down the pricing scale as their needs change over time.

AFI’s clients include colleges and private universities, cities and counties, school districts and non-profits. We have small towns and private universities managing only a handful of grants, to the largest colleges in the country managing thousands of grant funded projects. While the system will scale to meet clients all along that spectrum, the typical client is managing between 15 and 40 awarded grants per year, with mix of government and foundation funding. Most have a dedicated Grant Coordinator and are typically coming to us because:

• they’ve outgrown spreadsheets and Access databases
• they’ve experienced negative audit findings and have either returned funding or are concerned about the viability of their future applications without the credibility offered by strong internal controls
• someone is retiring and taking with them most of the institutional knowledge that drove the success of their program, and either the person leaving wants to build a knowledge base, or the incoming person wishes they had one.

Our implementation process is one of things that truly sets GrantNavigator apart. Account setup and configuration can typically be completed in a matter of minutes. If you’re currently using another database (whether homegrown or purchased) to track your data, then you’re already 90% of the way there. Most programs provide tools for simple data export. Assuming you have access to that data, our staff will manually create your projects and grants in the system, upload your data, and even schedule your remaining reporting deadlines in the system. So when we schedule your training, you’ll be trained in the context of your own data in your fully implemented system, with functional dashboards and available reports on day 1. If it takes a little longer for you to compile that data, no worries. We operate on your timetable, not ours.

Again, the simple answer is “yes”. When we first launched back in 2009, this was a harder question to answer. We collected dozens of data values throughout the multiple stages of the grant life cycle. Over the years, new fields were added here and there based on customer demand. Finally, we figured out that the real solution was to allow the client to simply manage those data fields on their own, and we launched Custom Field Management. While this configurability is only available in the Premium version, it essentially allows the client to make the GrantNavigator database whatever they want it to be. Custom Field Management truly makes GrantNavigator YOUR grant management system.