This tracker vs. tracking grants in a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet can do exactly what this tracker does -- hold every award's date, reporting interval, amount, and spend, and turn that into a next report date and a restricted balance. Nothing about the underlying math is exotic. What a blank spreadsheet does not give you is calendar-correct month arithmetic built in (a 31 January award with a one-month interval has to land on 28 February, not roll over into March), or an automatic re-sort by urgency every time you open the file, rather than however the rows happened to be ordered when a report was last added.
This tracker is that structure already built: enter an award's date, reporting interval, amount, and spend, and it computes the next due date with the month-length edge cases handled, flags it overdue or due soon against today automatically, and keeps the whole list sorted by which report needs attention first every time the page loads.
| Question | Where to answer it |
|---|---|
| Can a spreadsheet track the same award date, interval, amount, and spend? | Yes -- the underlying fields are the same either way. |
| Does a one-month interval off a 31st-of-the-month award date land on the right day? | This tracker — DATE() formulas that don't clamp to the shorter month roll over instead of landing on the last day, a mistake that's easy to miss until a report looks a few days late for no reason. |
| Will the row that just became overdue actually sort to the top? | This tracker, automatically. In a spreadsheet, only if you remember to re-sort after every edit. |
| Do I need to build the formulas myself, or maintain them as awards are added? | This tracker: no formulas to write. A spreadsheet: yes, and they need to be copied correctly down every new row. |
| Do I need a shared file several staff can edit together, or custom columns for my own workflow? | A spreadsheet — this tracker has no accounts, no sharing, and a fixed set of fields. |
Most of what a spreadsheet gets wrong here isn't the arithmetic, it's the maintenance: a formula that doesn't clamp to a shorter month, or a sort order that goes stale the moment one more award is added. This tracker trades the spreadsheet's flexibility for a page that already gets both of those right, with nothing typed here ever leaving your browser.
It needs no account and no sign-in: it is a static page, the arithmetic runs in your browser, and once it has loaded it keeps working with the connection off.
Common questions
Isn't a spreadsheet just as accurate as this tracker?
A carefully built one can be — next report due date is award date plus the reporting interval in months, and restricted balance is award amount minus spend, which is ordinary date and subtraction math. The risk is not that the math is hard, it's month-length edge cases (a report interval that lands on 31 January needs to become 28 February, not 3 March) and remembering to re-sort every row by urgency after each edit across several awards, rather than scrolling past the one that quietly became overdue.
What does this tracker do that a spreadsheet doesn't do automatically?
It computes each award's next report date with calendar-correct month arithmetic, flags a row overdue or due soon against today's date without you checking, and keeps the whole list sorted by which report needs attention first — every time you open the page, not only the moment you last touched the spreadsheet. A spreadsheet does none of that unless you build the formulas and re-sort yourself, and the sort is the step most likely to be skipped when you're only adding one row.
When is a spreadsheet the better choice?
When you need something this tracker doesn't do: a shared file several staff edit together, custom columns for your own workflow, or a permanent record kept somewhere other than your own browser. This tracker stores what you enter only in your browser and is built for the narrower job of not missing the next report on the awards you already hold.
Open the Grant Reporting Tracker to add your own awards and reporting intervals.