Spreadsheets are not a bad starting point for grants administration. Organisations that tell you otherwise are often selling something. For a programme with 10–20 grants a year, a small team, and no complex post-award tracking requirements, a well-designed spreadsheet system can work. The evidence is that it does work — for a while, and then it doesn't.
The question is not "are spreadsheets adequate?" The question is: what does failure look like for your organisation, and when will you hit it? The answer depends on your grant volume, team size, funder accountability requirements, and whether you are tracking the post-award lifecycle at all or treating each grant as closed the moment the cheque is issued.
This article will help you answer that question.
It matters to acknowledge what spreadsheets do well, because the alternative to a bad spreadsheet is not necessarily purpose-built software. Sometimes it is a better spreadsheet. If you are running a small programme and software procurement feels disproportionate, that instinct deserves respect.
Spreadsheets are flexible. They can be configured to track almost anything without a vendor's involvement. They are familiar — most grants administrators are competent in Excel or Google Sheets without any training. They are cheap, often free. They have zero implementation time. And for simple, bounded use cases, they are genuinely adequate: tracking a single annual grant round with 30 applicants and a straightforward assessment process is not a strong use case for software investment.
The relevant question is not "can we do this in a spreadsheet?" Many things can be done in a spreadsheet. The question is "what does the spreadsheet make difficult that matters for our programme?" When the answer includes items from the following list, the conversation about alternatives becomes worth having.
1. You are managing post-award obligations manually. Spreadsheets track applications. They are poorly suited to tracking the relationship between a grant decision and everything that happens after it: milestone due dates, payment triggers, reporting obligations, contract variations, and final acquittals. When you are managing these stages using calendar reminders, email threads, and spreadsheet columns that require manual updates, you are spending staff time on coordination that a system should handle.
2. Multiple people need to work on the same data at the same time. Spreadsheet collaboration at scale produces version conflicts, overwritten entries, and the permanent uncertainty about which file is current. This is manageable for one administrator; it becomes a risk when two or three people are updating data concurrently or when someone is working from an offline copy.
3. Your reporting is manual and time-consuming. When producing a board report, funder summary, or ministerial update requires a staff member to manually compile information from multiple sheets, the time cost is real. More significantly, the error risk is real. Manual report compilation is where mistakes enter — and for publicly accountable funders, those mistakes carry consequences.
4. You have no reliable audit trail. Spreadsheets record data. They do not record who changed what, when, and why. For funders with accountability obligations — government agencies, Crown entities, charities with trustee oversight — the absence of a credible audit trail is not merely an inconvenience. It is a governance risk. When a funding decision is challenged or an OIA request arrives, "we have a spreadsheet" is not an adequate response.
5. Your intake process is email-based. When applications arrive by email as Word documents or PDFs, every stage of the pipeline from that point forward requires manual handling: reading attachments, extracting information, entering it somewhere, distributing it to assessors. This is the single highest-leverage point at which purpose-built software changes the economics — not because intake software is exotic, but because structured data at intake changes the cost of every downstream step.
The costs of a spreadsheet-based system are rarely calculated explicitly because they are distributed across ordinary tasks. They do not appear as a line item. They appear as staff hours.
Consider a grants programme receiving 150 applications per year with a 12-week assessment cycle and post-award tracking for 40 active grants. Rough estimates from organisations that have made the switch suggest:
None of these numbers are dramatic individually. Together, across a year, they represent a significant portion of a programme officer's time — time spent on administration rather than programme quality, stakeholder relationships, or strategic work.
When organisations that have made the switch from spreadsheets to purpose-built software reflect on the change, the recurring observation is not that the new system is impressive. It is that they did not realise how much of their week was disappearing into coordination overhead until it stopped.
Three factors are most predictive of whether purpose-built software will produce a positive return:
Volume. Above roughly 50–75 applications per year, the intake and coordination overhead of a spreadsheet-based system starts to produce measurable costs. Below that threshold, the spreadsheet's flexibility and zero implementation cost are genuine advantages.
Post-award complexity. Programmes that close their files at the grant decision stage have lower software ROI than programmes tracking milestones, payments, acquittals, and multi-year relationships. The more complex the post-award lifecycle, the more a system designed to manage it earns its cost.
Accountability requirements. Organisations with OIA obligations, audit requirements, trustee reporting, or ministerial oversight have accountability requirements that spreadsheets cannot credibly satisfy. For these organisations, the question is not whether to invest in purpose-built software but when and which one.
If your programme scores on all three dimensions — meaningful volume, active post-award tracking, and accountability requirements — the economic case for software is strong. If you score on one, the conversation is worth having. If you score on none, a better-designed spreadsheet is probably the right next step.
The barrier that most commonly delays the switch from spreadsheets to software is not cost — it is implementation anxiety. Organisations that have never procured a software system worry about the time, the disruption, and the risk of choosing the wrong platform.
For well-designed grants management platforms, implementation is typically a matter of weeks, not months. The work involved is largely configuration: setting up your programme structure, importing your existing data, configuring your assessment workflows, and testing before go-live. Staff training follows a train-the-trainer model — a programme manager learns the system in depth and trains their team. For most organisations, this is practical alongside normal workloads.
What it is not is a large IT project. Grants management software is not enterprise infrastructure. Implementation does not require a dedicated project manager, a systems integrator, or months of requirements gathering. Organisations across New Zealand and Australia have made this switch — over 50 NZ and AU funders trust Tahua specifically — and most describe the transition as less disruptive than they anticipated.
The timing question matters more than most organisations realise. The best time to implement is before your next grant round begins, not during it. If you are currently mid-round, note the problems you encounter and plan to fix them before the next one.
The conversation with a board, CEO, or finance committee about grants management software tends to go wrong in one of two ways: it is framed as a technology purchase (which triggers IT procurement scepticism) or it is framed as an efficiency argument without numbers (which is easy to defer).
The stronger framing is governance and risk.
For publicly accountable funders, the absence of a credible audit trail, COI management process, or reproducible reporting capability is a governance gap. Boards and trustees understand governance risk in a way they do not always engage with efficiency arguments. The question "can you demonstrate, to an auditor's standard, who made which decisions and on what basis?" is one that most spreadsheet-based operations cannot answer affirmatively.
For community foundations and private funders, the frame is capacity and programme quality. The staff time currently spent on administration is time not spent on grantee relationships, programme design, and impact reporting. Purpose-built software does not replace those functions — it creates space for them.
The concrete numbers help. A 60% reduction in administrative time is what Acorn Foundation experienced after moving to purpose-built grants management software — equivalent to freeing significant staff capacity without adding headcount. That is a credible number to bring to a leadership conversation.
The decision to move from spreadsheets to purpose-built software is not primarily a technology decision. It is a programme quality decision. If you would like to talk through your specific situation, book a 30-minute conversation.
For a broader overview of what grants management software covers across the full programme lifecycle, see our complete guide to grants management.