How long did the rebuild take?

It was delivered in four phases, moving from a relational applicant model through intake processing, a finance layer, and finally portal integration.

How does program work connect to finance?

Grant recommendations automatically generate financial records, prefill budgets, calculate payment schedules, enforce W-9 compliance, and route multi-level approvals, removing spreadsheets entirely.

What happened when intake moved to Submittable?

The core relational model and finance layer stayed intact and kept driving downstream processes with zero rework.

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Rebuilding a Grantmaking System, From Intake to Disbursement

Foundation Multi-Phase Grant Lifecycle

This foundation's grant intake ran through a fragile form integration, with program and finance disconnected by spreadsheet handoffs. I rebuilt the full lifecycle so program decisions flow directly into compliant financial execution.

Results at a Glance

65%

Faster Processing

$3M+

Annual Grant Volume

Zero

Compliance Issues

The Challenge

Applicant information lived as fields directly on the Application record. There were no Application Contacts, no relational structure, and no clean way to track people across cycles. Intake ran through a large, hard-to-maintain FormAssembly integration.

No relational structure for applicants, co-PIs, and collaborators
A complex FormAssembly integration that was hard to maintain
Program and finance disconnected by spreadsheet handoffs

The Approach

A four-phase rebuild:

Phase 1: Introduced an Application Contact junction object for multiple applications per person, accurate institutional tracking, and clean cross-cycle reporting
Phase 2: Built a four-path processing architecture with duplicate prevention, file classification, and downstream automation
Phase 3: Designed a finance layer (Expense Request, Budget Line, Budget Change, Expense Payment) with Bill.com integration
Phase 4: Integrated Submittable for the portal experience while keeping Salesforce as the system of record

Salesforce Objects & Tools

Application Contact junction object Expense Request & Budget Line objects Four-path intake processing Multi-level approval routing Bill.com integration FormAssembly & Submittable

Results

Eliminated 100% of manual handoffs between program and finance, removing 15+ hours of weekly spreadsheet work and cutting grant processing time by 65%
Delivered 100% disbursement compliance with zero missed W-9s, budget overruns, or IRS reporting issues across $3M+ in annual grant volume
Reduced finance inquiry response time from 2–3 days to under 30 seconds with real-time YTD visibility
Maintained zero rework during the Submittable migration, saving an estimated $45,000 in potential re-implementation costs

FAQ

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