Project management tools like Monday.com, Asana, Trello, and Notion are popular for organising team work. Some funders adapt these tools for grants management — tracking applications and grants as "projects" or "cards." While this can work for very simple programmes, the limitations become significant as programmes grow.
For small, simple grant programmes, project management tools provide some useful capabilities:
For a funder making 5-10 grants per year with no complex assessment, a Monday.com board might be adequate.
No applicant-facing portal. Project management tools are internal team tools — they don't provide a public portal where applicants can create accounts, submit applications, save progress, and view their history. Applications still come in through email or a separate form tool.
No structured assessment workflow. Structured peer review — assigning to reviewers, managing COI, scoring, moderation — isn't something project management tools do natively. Assessment in Monday.com would require custom automations or manual coordination outside the tool.
No grant agreement management. Generating, issuing, and tracking grant agreements requires document generation tools and e-signature platforms separate from the project management tool.
No milestone payment workflow. Tracking milestone completion, triggering payment release, and managing acquittal requires workflow capabilities that project management tools don't have.
No audit trail. Project management tools track task status but don't maintain the kind of immutable, attribution-clear audit trail that grants management compliance requires.
No ANZ compliance features. NZ Charities Register integration, DIA gaming trust documentation, OIA-ready records — none of these exist in general project management tools.
Data fragmentation. Applications come in through one channel, assessment happens in the project management tool, agreements are handled elsewhere, and reporting is separate. Data fragmentation is the core problem with using project management tools for grants.
Scale. A Monday.com board managing 300 applications in a round becomes very difficult to work with — without the batch operations, filters, and automation of purpose-built software.
Funders using project management tools for grants management often don't count the hidden costs:
- Staff time manually moving application data from emails or forms into the board
- Time spent tracking down documents and records that aren't in one place
- The risk of losing information when staff leave
- Annual reporting that requires hours of manual data compilation
- Applicant experience that creates confusion and generates support queries
These costs compound as programmes grow.
Even when using purpose-built grants management software, project management tools have a place — for internal team coordination, staff project planning, and non-grant work. The distinction is clear:
The mistake is trying to use one for the other.
Funders moving from a project management tool or spreadsheets to purpose-built grants management software often worry about the migration effort. In practice:
Tahua is purpose-built for ANZ grantmakers — replacing the patchwork of project tools, spreadsheets, email, and document systems with an integrated grants management system.