Improving the Grant Approver Process
As a large foundation, we believe the proper way to manage grant approvers is by allowing specific users authority at the fund level. More specifically, this is almost always based on Fund Group, SubGroup, Division, or Segment. It’s very difficult to manage this, though. When assigning approvers, you have to manually choose each fund they can approve, one by one. There’s no way to filter the list of funds, and there’s no batch update function. Other than being time consuming, this can lead to certain funds being missed when making changes. In addition, there are times when all grant approvers for a particular fund are out of the office, which puts grants on hold unnecessarily. To alleviate this, we have a couple of suggestions, but other approaches are welcome. We simply want something that makes this less cumbersome and less susceptible to error.
First, if we be really helpful if we could filter the list of funds in Grant Approvers by Fund Group, SubGroup, Division, or Segment. That alone would be dramatically improve the approval process, assuming the “All” specification applies to the filtered list.
For temporary grant approvals when someone is absent, it would be great if there was a function where we could specify replacing person 1 with person 2 on all funds, with a scheduled start date and end date. That way if someone is known to be out of the office, we can have someone else replace them during their absence.
Those are just suggestions, but alleviating the issues are our main concern.
Joel Schwartz
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