Charitable organisations that administer grants — trusts, foundations, charitable companies, and incorporated societies with grantmaking purposes — have a distinct combination of requirements that sets them apart from government funders on one side and informal community trusts on the other.
On the accountability side, charities in New Zealand and Australia are registered with their respective regulators (Charities Services NZ, ACNC in Australia) and have reporting obligations that require structured grant data. On the governance side, the board of trustees has a fiduciary responsibility to ensure funds are distributed in accordance with the charitable purposes for which they were established. On the operational side, most charity grants programmes are run by small teams with limited IT support and no tolerance for software that requires expensive professional services to configure or maintain.
This guide covers what to look for when evaluating grants management software as a charitable funder.
Charities have two accountability relationships that shape their software requirements: accountability to the regulator and accountability to the board.
Regulator reporting. In New Zealand, registered charities must file an Annual Return with Charities Services that includes data on grants made during the year. In Australia, ACNC-registered charities must complete an Annual Information Statement that includes total grants made, purposes of distributions, and geographic data. A grants management system that can produce this data in usable form — without staff manually aggregating from spreadsheets — materially reduces the annual reporting burden.
Trustee accountability. The board of a charitable trust is legally responsible for ensuring the trust's assets are applied in accordance with its purposes. That requires the board to be satisfied that the assessment process was fair, that grants were made to eligible recipients, and that recipients used grants as intended. Software that produces governance-ready reporting — board-level summaries of funding distributed, assessment decisions, and post-award compliance — supports this trustee accountability without generating significant staff overhead.
Most charity grants programmes are run by small teams. A community foundation with an annual grants programme may have one dedicated grants coordinator, or a grants function that is shared between the coordinator and a manager with broader responsibilities. The software has to work for that team.
This has practical implications:
Configuration should not require IT support. A system that requires a developer or a professional services engagement to configure a new application form or adjust an assessment template creates dependency that most charity teams cannot sustain. Self-service configuration — where a grants coordinator can set up a new round without technical help — is a practical necessity, not a luxury.
Training time should be short. Assessors who are external volunteers or sector experts have limited patience for complex tools. The assessor experience needs to be simple enough to complete without training, or with minimal guidance.
Support needs to be accessible. When something goes wrong during a live grants round, the team needs help in working hours, not a 24-hour ticket queue. For NZ and Australian charities, support availability during NZST/AEST business hours matters.
Many charitable trusts and foundations administer multiple funds simultaneously. These may include:
Each fund may have different eligibility requirements, different application forms, different assessment frameworks, and different reporting requirements. A system that handles multi-fund complexity without requiring separate instances or duplicated configuration is significantly more efficient than a general-purpose tool that needs to be reconfigured for each fund.
Software marketed as "grants management software for nonprofits" or "charity management software" often means US-focused software designed for grant recipients rather than grant administrators — or general-purpose CRM tools that have been positioned as grants solutions. Neither is purpose-built for the grantmaking function.
What actually matters for charity grantmakers:
Application intake. The application portal should be configurable to the charity's specific questions, eligibility criteria, and document requirements. It should produce a structured record that flows into the assessment process.
Assessment workflow. The system should handle structured scoring against criteria, COI declarations, and a panel recommendation workflow — not just a place to store uploaded applications.
Decision communications. Offer letters and decline letters should be generated from the grant record, with configurable templates that reflect the charity's style and legal obligations. Both successful and unsuccessful applicants should receive timely, personalised communications.
Post-award management. Milestone schedules, reporting submissions, and payment releases should all be managed within the same system as the pre-award process. Separating post-award tracking into a different tool creates the data siloing that generates most administrative overhead.
Governance reporting. Board members should be able to see programme-level reporting without requiring staff to compile it manually. Grant distributions by fund, by purpose, and by recipient type; milestone compliance across the active portfolio; and year-on-year comparison data.
Charity funders are often cost-sensitive, particularly smaller trusts and foundations with modest operating budgets. The relevant comparison is not between a purpose-built system and a free tool — it is between a purpose-built system and the true cost of the current process.
Spreadsheet-based grants administration has a real cost: in staff time spent on manual tracking, in the overhead of managing inconsistent data across multiple files, and in the risk of compliance failures that arise when records are incomplete or dispersed. Purpose-built software that reduces that overhead typically pays for itself in staff efficiency, even at a modest per-round operating cost.
The relevant questions for cost evaluation:
For charitable trusts and foundations evaluating grants management software, the community foundations page covers how Tahua handles multi-fund complexity, trustee reporting, and charity regulator compliance. Tahua is used by community foundations and charitable trusts across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia.