Farewell Excel! Achieve Compliance Through Workflow Automation

CHRISTIAN VLAHOPAULOS: Welcome and thanks for listening to the Cherry Bekaert Government and Public Sector podcast series. In each episode, we hear from the best in the business on the latest challenges, trends, and opportunities affecting the government and public sector.

I am Christian Vlahopaulos, leader of Cherry Bekaert’s Government & Public Sector industry team. I hope you enjoy the episode, and thank you for joining us.

KIMBERLY KONACK: Welcome everyone to the "Farewell Excel: Achieve Compliance Through Workflow Automation" episode, part five of our grants management podcast series. This episode will focus on grants compliance and the benefits of using automation for tracking and reporting.

I am Kimberly Konack. I am a converted grants management nerd five years in. I work with Cherry Bekaert and our grants management team.

We are a team of experts in all things grants management. This includes pre-award grant readiness, post-award grant compliance, operational support, organizational indirect cost analysis, and grant technology solutions. Kat, why don't you tell us about yourself?

KAT KISER: My name is Kat Kiser, and I am a manager with Cherry Bekaert. I am the Grants Management Solutions team lead.

I have over 20 years of experience in accounting and grants management. This includes work with governments, nonprofits, and commercial agencies.

KIMBERLY KONACK: Thank you, Kat. Today we have a very special guest, Emily Knul, who is the Director of Customer Success at Amplifund, a leader in the grants management software market.

She and her team work daily to help customers leverage processes and systems to facilitate compliance through workflow automation. Welcome, Emily. Please give us a background on yourself.

EMILY KNUL: Thanks so much. As Kimberly said, I am Emily Knul, the Director of Customer Success here at Amplifund.

I have been with Amplifund for about four years and have the pleasure of working with our customers every day. I worked as an implementation team lead for a few years and have since transitioned to leading our customer success team.

My team is focused on ensuring our customers achieve their goals and their vision through their use of Amplifund. I am the new kid on the block with grants management in this group.

Prior to my time at Amplifund, I worked in the healthcare logistics and food safety industries. While those are different spaces, they are all focused on the same mission of enabling and empowering customers.

KAT KISER: I have a question, but first, I would like to say that I take credit for turning Kimberly into a grant nerd, and I am very proud of that. My goal is to turn everyone who does not know anything about grants into a grant nerd. You are my first conquest.

KIMBERLY KONACK: Thank you. It can happen to you. Just watch out.

EMILY KNUL: I think I am on my way.

KAT KISER: I will take credit for Emily when it happens as well. I want to ask this question right up front because it is important to me and many others.

Why should I give up my beloved Excel spreadsheets for automation? I have mixed emotions about this because I am very familiar and comfortable with Excel.

What is the benefit for someone who has been using Excel for the 20-plus years I have been working in grants and accounting? What is the benefit to ditching a tried-and-true method that I know works?

EMILY KNUL: We know many people who are in that "Excel Club," and it is hard to imagine life without your valued spreadsheet. For some customers, contemplating a change when you have a process down is hard to fathom.

It is a great question because I am a fan of the saying, "What got you here isn't going to get you there." The reality is that spreadsheets allow flexibility and comfort, but they lack synergy and traceability.

Spreadsheets rely on a person to drive the action. Many of our customers live in a decentralized grants management world where challenges with collaboration are prevalent.

Spreadsheets do not provide the full suite of tools needed to feed effective synergy across different departments. I think collaboration is one of the primary benefits.

If you or your team is struggling with collaboration, automation is worth stepping outside of your comfort zone. It can help improve communication across different groups interacting with grants.

Automation can simplify processes to create better engagement across all teams. The next point is traceability, auditability, and compliance.

Spreadsheets do not give good visibility into who is doing what, when, and how. That traceability is important for audits and ensures the reporting delivered to funders is clean and accurate.

A key benefit of automation is knowing who is responsible for steps in your process and having the line of sight to know they are taking the expected action. Automation requires you to set the process first, but it then gives you the ability to confirm the process is being followed.

This consistency is vital in the grants world. The ability to renew existing funding or add more funding in the future requires consistency and accuracy so that your funder trusts you.

Spreadsheets rely on memory and institutional knowledge. That works if you have the same grant manager in a seat for years, but in this industry, chairs are shifting all the time.

Institutional knowledge gets lost during transitions. Automated tools allow for logic and data to drive action rather than an individual's memory.

Data-driven action requires a higher level of precision than spreadsheets might be capable of. Finally, automated tools allow integration between systems, sharing data to reduce manual effort.

KAT KISER: I am thinking very strongly about what you said. What really hit me was the mention of chairs shifting.

How often do we talk to an agency or government that had a grant manager for a year before they left? Now they can't find anyone with experience to fill in.

If the data is inside an automated system, it is much easier for a new person to learn and understand what is going on with the grants. Spreadsheets cannot do that, so I am going to think about the best way to say farewell to Excel.

KIMBERLY KONACK: I also heard about the time you save because you do not have to retrieve information from a decentralized grant system. You might have police and fire departments handling their own grants, and you are not sure what they are doing.

Then they come to the finance or budget department after the fact asking for help because they are being audited. I can see where this would save a lot of time.

Emily, the amount of grant funding organizations have received has increased drastically, especially due to CARES and ARPA. Now we have the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding as well.

How are organizations handling this huge influx of grant funding and staying compliant without using workflow automation?

EMILY KNUL: This is a tough one. We often hear from customers that this burden is put squarely on the grant manager's shoulders to figure it out.

The end result is that grant managers end up overworked and overstressed. They are trying to take legacy tools and spreadsheets that worked for a small portfolio and apply them to funding streams with complex requirements.

They cannot get it done with spreadsheets. The scalability is not there as the data grows. Whether it is the number of grants, subrecipients, or overall dollars, it becomes too complex for Excel to keep up.

KIMBERLY KONACK: Tell us more about Amplifund and what it can do to help entities struggling with grant tracking, reporting, and compliance, especially in light of this influx of funding.

EMILY KNUL: This is my favorite thing to talk about. This is Amplifund's purpose: we strive to create a better world by simplifying business processes and amplifying grant resources to help customers accelerate their missions.

Our customer-facing teams are laser-focused on tracking, reporting, and compliance. We engage with customers to understand their existing processes and what is or is not working.

Through implementation, we take activities mostly relying on Excel and manual efforts and design a new reality driven by technology. This increases the impact of the existing team.

We see struggles in grant tracking that are very common. The first area we address is getting all grant data, documents, and resources into a common place within Amplifund.

Data centralization then unleashes the ability for data to drive action through workflow automation. This includes things like automating notifications for reporting due dates or prompting teams to get involved at various stages of the grant life cycle.

A key goal in pursuing a grant management system is creating the capability for robust reporting, whether for internal teams, funders, or executives. Centralizing data and using automation can help achieve those reporting goals.

It can be a real challenge if you're stuck in Excel. While the power to create a graph exists in a spreadsheet, getting the right data from various systems can be difficult.

Compliance is another big focus. We help power compliance so organizations can continue their missions, which they cannot achieve without a continuation of grant funding.

We support customers by automating processes like pre-award approval steps or award closeout processes. This ensures the organization follows the steps set to retain that funding.

Finally, I'll mention our fantastic team. We have a number of Certified Grants Management Specialists on our team who have served as grant managers in the public sector or nonprofits.

We bring a fresh perspective and best practices to conversations about automation and long-term support.

KIMBERLY KONACK: I echo your sentiments. I have had the privilege of working with the Amplifund system and the team, and it is excellent.

Just for fun, let's walk through a scenario. Let's say an organization has 100 grant awards, each with a different reporting cycle and requirements.

How can workflow automation keep the organization's reporting accurate and timely better than Excel? It feels like a middle school word problem.

KAT KISER: I am going to pin my decision on workflow automation based on your answer. Go!

EMILY KNUL: This is the reality for so many people we talk to. Workflow automation can absolutely help with accuracy and timeliness.

The first step is getting the base data of those grants into a system. Once you have basics like the grant period of performance and reporting cadence, workflow can take over.

If those 100 grants touch 10 teams across your organization, the workflow triggers reminders based on those dates. This eliminates the need to monitor a spreadsheet daily to identify due dates.

It sends reminders out to the team to ensure they are on track, including past-due alerts if necessary. This takes the manual work off your plate.

It also helps with reporting requirements, such as getting sign-offs or approvals before submitting a report to a funder. Workflow automation can handle that step consistently without you personally touching it.

Another benefit is ensuring that copies of reports are saved in a central location. This ensures that when someone leaves the organization, you still know what was submitted to the funder and have access to it.

If a grant manager wants to take a vacation, everything does not have to stop. Deadlines do not have to be missed, and no one has to learn how to navigate a personal spreadsheet.

Workflow automation keeps things moving while employees are away. Regarding accuracy, combining data from many sources into Excel with complex formulas can lead to errors.

The flexibility of a spreadsheet means there are often no checks and balances. An Excel file will not alert you if your grant budget is nearly spent or if someone accidentally adds an extra zero to an expense.

Automation via expense caps or spending alerts can help ensure accuracy in your reporting.

KAT KISER: I think I am sold. I have worked in places where I managed 100 grants, and all the ways workflow automation and Amplifund can help result in significant time savings.

It means better compliance and fewer findings on a single audit or grant audit. I really like it.

KIMBERLY KONACK: I agree, but how would an entity decide what is the best workflow solution for them?

KAT KISER: I want to jump in because I have dealt with several agencies that want to look at workflow automation but do not know where to start. Cost is a big factor; a small nonprofit might not be able to afford more expensive software.

Functionality is also a huge factor. If you are a grant recipient with subawards, you need to stay compliant with subrecipient monitoring and your own funding regulations.

You need a program that performs functions for both recipients and subrecipients. We also did not mention that Amplifund has a module to help you search for grants.

They have pre-award, post-award, and a search component, which many people need because they do not know where to find funding. Emily, what other factors play into choosing a software?

EMILY KNUL: Access across your teams is a big one. You want to make sure the tool gives everyone the right level of access to perform the functions that make the workflow work.

Amplifund uses an unlimited user model to reduce barriers. We want to provide data access to everyone in your organization who can power your mission without being hindered by a user count.

This ensures our team is focused on optimizing your use of the tool rather than upselling seats. Another factor is the onboarding and implementation.

Solutions that sit on a shelf will not help you get rid of spreadsheets. You must understand what it takes to implement and learn the tools to maximize your investment.

The implementation process should focus on making the biggest impact on your organization. Think about how you will train others and hold them accountable.

Executive buy-in and clear roles and responsibilities are critical. Finally, ensure the tool addresses your top problems, such as audit findings.

Ensure the tools can handle your current challenges and your future needs as your grant portfolio expands.

KIMBERLY KONACK: That is incredible, Emily. Thank you so much for the insight into workflow automation and best practices for managing grants. Thank you, Kat, as well.

If you would like to reach out to us, you can reach me at kimberly.konack@cbh.com or Kat at kat.kiser@cbh.com. If you have questions about workflow automation or Amplifund, email Emily at eknul@amplifund.com.

Our next podcast will revolve around the highly requested topic of grants management and staff transitions. We will explore strategies for ensuring compliance and address common challenges organizations face during periods of upheaval.

Thank you to our audience for listening. Remember to subscribe to the series at www.cbh.com/gov-record-podcast.

CHRISTIAN VLAHOPAULOS: This is Christian again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and look forward to our next one. Don't forget to subscribe.