Sub-funds / Stewardship / Scale
TRUSTS &FOUNDATIONS.
Foundations are usually small teams carrying a disproportionate administrative load: many funds, many donors, many small grants, and an annual return that has to reconcile. Backed is built to make that load scale with the grant book rather than with the headcount.
The status quo
HOW THIS RUNSTODAY
None of this is anyone’s fault. Each of these is a sensible response to a real constraint, and together they produce a record that cannot answer the question it will eventually be asked.
01
One workbook, one keeper
Hundreds of named sub-funds are tracked in one workbook, and only one person truly understands its formulas.
02
A week per payment run
A payment run takes most of a week, because each payment is checked against a different tab.
03
Impact assembled by hand
Donors ask what their fund achieved this year, and the answer has to be assembled by hand.
04
Forms that come back twice
Application forms are PDFs. Applicants email them back, sometimes twice, sometimes as photographs.
05
Limits held in memory
Distribution policy limits are enforced by memory rather than by the system that makes the payment.
06
A return rebuilt every year
The annual return is reconstructed each year from files rather than extracted from a record.
With Backed
WHAT CHANGESAND WHY
The same six pressure points, answered by the system rather than by somebody remembering. Each of these is a control, not a convention.
01
Every fund on its own record
Every sub-fund is a first-class object: its own balance, its own distribution policy, its own grant history.
02
Payments in one movement
Payments batch, carry a secondary approval, and export to the accounting system in one movement.
03
Impact as a saved report
Per-fund reporting is a saved report, not an annual project, including the impact evidence grantees supplied.
04
Applications that save themselves
Applicants work in a branded portal that autosaves, so an incomplete application is visibly incomplete.
05
Limits enforced at approval
Approval limits are configured per fund and enforced at the point of approval.
06
The return is an export
The annual return is an export of the record, in the shape the ACNC statement expects.
How it works
ONE AUDITABLEWORKFLOW
From round configuration through to the final accountability report.
Model the fund structure
Sub-funds, named funds and the distribution policy attached to each. Where a fund carries donor intent, that intent is on the fund rather than in a file note.
Open the round the fund pays for
A round can draw on one fund or several. Eligibility can be narrowed to the purpose the trust deed specifies, so ineligible applications are screened before they are written.
Assess with the people you have
Volunteer assessors, board members and external advisers get a focused workspace and a declared-conflict gate. The scoring is the same rigour as a large funder at a fraction of the coordination cost.
Decide inside the policy
Delegate approval respects the limit set on the fund. Awarding a different amount from the one requested is recorded as a variance, so the pattern is visible across the year.
Pay and reconcile
Batch the payments, approve them against the limit, mark them paid, and push them to the accounting system with the reference intact.
Report to the donor and the regulator
Per-fund impact reporting for donors, and a portfolio extract for the ACNC Annual Information Statement and the board pack.
Capabilities
What you get
- Sub-fund and named-fund structures with their own balances and policies
- Distribution limits enforced per fund at the point of approval
- Donor-facing impact reporting drawn from grantee acquittal evidence
- Organisation profiles holding the full funding history across years
- Duplicate detection on organisations and contacts
- Batch payments with a secondary approval before finance sees them
- Accounting-system sync with the reconciliation reference retained
- Data reports built across any part of the lifecycle, shared to a folder or exported
- Applicant portal branded per funding category, not just per organisation
- Volunteer and board assessor access with declared-conflict gating
- Multi-year grants with tranches and milestone gates
- Deactivation, archival and retirement · nothing is deleted, and the trail survives
Common questions
Before you ask
Can one round draw on several funds?
Yes. A round can be funded from one sub-fund or apportioned across several, and the apportionment is recorded on the award, so per-fund reporting stays accurate without a reconciliation step.
How do you handle donor-advised funds?
A donor-advised fund is a sub-fund with its own purpose, balance and advisory contact. Recommendations can be recorded against it, and the distribution still passes through the same approval and payment controls as any other grant.
Does it work for a two-person foundation?
That is the case it is most useful in. The whole point of the configuration layer is that a small team gets the same controls as a large one without a large one’s setup budget.
What about the ACNC Annual Information Statement?
The figures it asks for (grants made, amounts, recipients, purposes) are fields on the record rather than a spreadsheet built in June. Build the extract once as a saved report and run it each year.
Can grantees update their own details?
Yes. The organisation record is shared between the applicant portal and your team, so a changed bank account or signatory is a change the grantee makes and you approve, not an email you re-key.