The platform
SEVEN PHASES.ONE RECORD.
Design the round, collect the applications, assess them, decide, contract, track delivery and pay, without stitching together a form tool, a spreadsheet and a CRM that was built to sell things.
The lifecycle
HOW THE WORKCONNECTS
Each phase carries its decisions, its evidence and its relationships forward. Jump to the part of your process that is under pressure, or read it as one movement from open to acquittal.
Setup
Turn a funding policy into a working round. Programme staff configure the form, the eligibility rules, the assessment stages, the dates and the applicant-facing pages, without a developer, a change request or a new spreadsheet.
02Application
Give applicants a clear path from eligibility to submission. A branded portal keeps the work in one place, autosaves every keystroke, and says plainly what is still missing, which is the single biggest lever on both completion rates and inbound support email.
03Assessment
Run rigorous assessment without losing control of conflicts or evidence. Assessors get a workspace showing only their assignments; declarations are structured, enforced and permanent; scores aggregate across panels and stages against the criteria you published.
04Decision
Move from a committee conversation to a recorded decision with the reasoning attached. Route approvals to named delegates, record the rationale against the application, and generate offer and decline letters from controlled templates.
05Contract
Connect the decision to the agreement that follows it. Contracts move through draft, sent, signed, active and closed; variations, terminations and withdrawals are formal events with their own record; and the document as signed is kept, not just the template it came from.
06Milestone
Track what was promised against what arrived. Milestones carry due dates, forms, reviewers and reminders; progress and final accountability reports are collected through the same portal the application came through; and overdue is a state the system knows about.
07Payment
Move money only when the obligations behind it are met. Awards split into tranches, tranches gate on milestone approval, batches carry a secondary approval, and the finance system receives clean data instead of a re-keyed spreadsheet.
01 · Setup
Open a round
Turn a funding policy into a working round. Programme staff configure the form, the eligibility rules, the assessment stages, the dates and the applicant-facing pages, without a developer, a change request or a new spreadsheet.
- Drag-and-drop form builder: short and long text, numbers, money, dates, addresses, ABN lookup, tables, file upload, declarations
- Conditional questions · an applicant is shown only what their earlier answers make relevant
- Eligibility screening that runs before an applicant starts writing, not after they submit
- Formulas and calculated totals inside the form, so a budget table adds itself up
- Multiple rounds open at once, each with its own dates, branding and approval limits
- Funding categories carry their own form, branding and delegation ceiling
What changes
A controlled round opens in hours, not in the weeks it takes to book engineering.
02 · Application
Collect applications
Give applicants a clear path from eligibility to submission. A branded portal keeps the work in one place, autosaves every keystroke, and says plainly what is still missing, which is the single biggest lever on both completion rates and inbound support email.
- The portal carries your organisation’s logo, colours and terminology
- Autosave on every field · an application survives a closed laptop and a dropped connection
- Multiple people from one organisation can work on the same application
- Direct upload of PDFs, spreadsheets, images and video into the application record
- An outstanding-items list the applicant can see, not a validation error at the end
- Works on a phone: start at a community meeting, finish on a laptop that night
What changes
Fewer incomplete submissions, and far fewer emails asking what “in progress” means.
03 · Assessment
Assess fairly
Run rigorous assessment without losing control of conflicts or evidence. Assessors get a workspace showing only their assignments; declarations are structured, enforced and permanent; scores aggregate across panels and stages against the criteria you published.
- A dedicated assessor portal for external and volunteer reviewers
- Weighted scoring rubrics · criteria and weightings set per round
- Conflict of interest declared per round. A declared conflict removes access; it does not just flag it
- Blind review · applicant and organisation identity suppressed during scoring
- Panels, with scores aggregated and variance visible to the convenor
- Multi-stage chains: staff triage, then external review, then committee
- Structured feedback that can be released to applicants after the decision
What changes
An assessment record your committee can defend, assembled as the work happens.
04 · Decision
Decide and tell people
Move from a committee conversation to a recorded decision with the reasoning attached. Route approvals to named delegates, record the rationale against the application, and generate offer and decline letters from controlled templates.
- Approval routed to named delegates against a configured financial limit
- Bulk approve or decline, with a standard reason recorded on each
- Committee minutes recorded against the application they relate to
- Offer and regret letters from templates, with merge fields filled from the record
- Award an amount different from the one requested, and keep the variance
- A standardised decline reason set, so refusal reporting is possible at all
- Every decision timestamped and attributed to a named person
What changes
Faster decisions, with the audit trail already assembled rather than reconstructed.
05 · Contract
Contract and vary
Connect the decision to the agreement that follows it. Contracts move through draft, sent, signed, active and closed; variations, terminations and withdrawals are formal events with their own record; and the document as signed is kept, not just the template it came from.
- Contract states: draft → sent → signed → active → varied → closed
- Formal variations (extended deadlines, changed amounts) with their own approval and trail
- Full version history across every contract document
- The signed document snapshotted, so a later template change cannot rewrite history
- Contracts attached to the organisation, not to whichever staff member arranged them
- A template library with versioning for your standard terms
What changes
The agreement in force is always the one the system can show you.
06 · Milestone
Track delivery and acquittal
Track what was promised against what arrived. Milestones carry due dates, forms, reviewers and reminders; progress and final accountability reports are collected through the same portal the application came through; and overdue is a state the system knows about.
- Milestone schedules set at award, not assembled afterwards
- Progress and final accountability report forms assigned per grant
- Automated reminders before and after a due date · no one has to remember
- Review and sign-off on a report, with the reviewer recorded
- Impact evidence collected with the report: photographs, testimonials, counts
- Overdue reporting visible across the portfolio, not per grant
What changes
A live account of where the funding went and what it achieved, before the board asks.
07 · Payment
Pay and reconcile
Move money only when the obligations behind it are met. Awards split into tranches, tranches gate on milestone approval, batches carry a secondary approval, and the finance system receives clean data instead of a re-keyed spreadsheet.
- Tranche payments: split one award across instalments with their own dates
- Payments blocked until the milestone they depend on is approved
- Scheduled payment dates, so cashflow can be forecast from the grant book
- GST and tax treatment configured per payment
- A secondary approval step before anything reaches finance
- Overpayments and refunds tracked back to the fund
- Export and sync to the accounting system, with the reconciliation reference kept
What changes
Payments move when obligations are met, not when someone updates a spreadsheet.
Underneath every phase
CONNECTED DATA.GOVERNANCE-GRADE CONTROLS.
The lifecycle works because the platform beneath it keeps context, systems and permissions connected. Change one of these in isolation and the phases stop handing each other a complete record.
Who you fund
The entity record
A living record of every organisation and contact you fund, carrying its history rather than restating it each round.
- Organisation profiles holding the full funding history across years
- Contacts with their role: signatory, board member, primary contact
- Beneficiary and member registers where the organisation keeps one
- Duplicate detection on organisations and on contacts
- Internal notes, visible to your team and never to the applicant
- Relationships between organisations · auspicing, affiliation, parent bodies
What you can prove
Reporting and data
Build a table across any part of the lifecycle, share it to a folder, export it, or let the analytics stack read it directly.
- A report builder that reaches every stage: applications, scores, decisions, contracts, payments, milestones
- Live filtering with CSV export
- Charts by category, region, outcome and success rate
- Saved reports shared to a folder, so the board pack is a re-run and not a rebuild
- Read-only, versioned public API using OAuth 2.0 client credentials
- A feed the BI tool can consume without an export step
What it connects to
Integrations
Approved finance and programme data moves without another manual export, and the reconciliation reference comes back with it.
- Accounting sync: approved payments pushed as bills, with the reference retained
- Payment export in the formats a finance team already reconciles
- REST API for CRM, data warehouse and membership systems
- Single sign-on via the identity provider you already run
- Outbound notification hooks for the systems that need to know
Who can see what
Security and administration
Granular access, strong authentication, complete activity history, and Australian hosting: the controls a governance committee asks about before anything else.
- Role-based access control across administrator, programme manager, assessor and auditor
- Multi-tenancy with data isolated per organisation
- Single sign-on and enforced multi-factor authentication on administrative accounts
- Data access rules narrowing a user to their own programmes
- A complete audit log of configuration changes and on-behalf actions
- Records held in Australia (AWS Sydney), aws-ap-southeast-2; some processing and mail delivery happen outside Australia, with a published subprocessor list
- Configurable retention and deletion, with archival rather than destruction by default
The specification record
WRITTEN DOWNBEFORE IT WAS BUILT
These are artefacts of this repository rather than customer outcomes. They are here because they can be checked, and because a funder handing over a decade of grant records is entitled to know how carefully the thing was put together.
Questions
What Funders Ask First
Can we run more than one programme?
Yes. Funding categories carry their own branding, forms, assessor pools and approval limits, and reporting can hold them apart or roll them together. A council running four community rounds and a department running forty use the same mechanism.
What happens to an application after the round closes?
Nothing is deleted. Records are deactivated, archived or retired, and the audit trail keeps the history either way. Retention periods are configurable, because the answer to "how long must we keep this" is set by your obligations, not by us.
Who can see an applicant’s answers?
Only the people whose permissions and data-access rules allow it. Assessors see the applications assigned to them and nothing else, and an assessor with a declared conflict loses access outright rather than seeing it with a warning attached.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. Applications autosave on every field, so an applicant can start on a phone at a community meeting and finish on a laptop that night without losing anything in between.
What does implementation actually involve?
Configuration rather than development: your forms, your eligibility rules, your assessment framework, your templates and your delegation limits. Most of the elapsed time is decisions your team makes, which is why the first workshop is about the programme and not the software.
Can we get our data out?
At any time, in a format you can use. There is a report builder with CSV export across every stage of the lifecycle, and a read-only, versioned API using OAuth 2.0 client credentials for anything that needs a live feed.