The Dashboard is an organization-wide finance overview. Use it to assess award and funding coverage and open the workflow behind an exception.

The dashboard combines active GrantLink grants with approved or posted allocations, recognized grant income, budgets, reporting cycles, and the latest mirrored QuickBooks Online (QuickBooks Online) data. It is not a live QuickBooks Online view, a bank balance, or a funder report.

Important: Dashboard totals currently include grants with Awarded, Active, or Closeout status. Pending allocations are excluded from spending totals until approved or posted. Use the underlying grant, allocation, income, and QuickBooks Online records for reconciliation.

Before You Start

Confirm that:

Grant award amounts, dates, statuses, and budgets are current in GrantLink.
The latest QuickBooks Online refresh is complete in Settings > Sync.
Each grant's QuickBooks links correctly identifies its expenses and money received, or the grant is intentionally app-only.
Material allocations have been reviewed and approved or posted.
Manual receipts entered outside QuickBooks Online have been entered only when they are not duplicates of synced QuickBooks Online income.

Read a Grant's Funding Position

Open a grant and use Overview to review its funding position before interpreting the organization-wide dashboard.

Grant measure	Current calculation
Recorded spend	Effective direct operating-expense allocations plus recorded indirect spend attributed to the grant
Award remaining	Recorded award amount minus recorded spend
Received funding remaining	Recognized cash received minus recorded spend

Award coverage remains unknown when the award amount is not recorded. A negative award position means recorded spend exceeds the award; a negative received-funding position means spending is ahead of recognized cash. Neither measure is a bank balance.

The cumulative chart groups dated direct and indirect spend by accounting date. It can switch between recorded spend over time and award remaining over time. Undated spend remains in the total but is disclosed under Timeline coverage instead of being placed on an invented date.

For time- or purpose-restricted grants, the panel also separates restricted award remaining from restricted funding left or spend ahead. For perpetual restrictions, principal is shown as not spendable. Open Budget for categories, period budgets, actuals, remaining amounts, and variance; budget, award, and received-funding positions answer different questions.

Boundary: The grant chart describes recorded accounting activity. It does not forecast future spending, calculate runway, or determine whether a cost is allowable.

Read the Organization Funding Position

The top panel compares recorded spend with two cumulative references:

Measure	Current calculation	What it is not
Received funding coverage	Recognized cash received minus direct and indirect recorded spend	A bank or QuickBooks Online cash-account balance
Award coverage	Known recorded awards minus recorded spend	Cash received, budget remaining, or an automatically validated receivable

The coverage tracks disclose direct and indirect spend. The summary groups grants with funding remaining, spend ahead of receipts, or zero coverage, and separately discloses time/purpose restrictions, perpetual principal, and grants whose award amount is missing. A bounded-source warning means the snapshot is incomplete and must not be used as a reconciled total.

Review the Work Queue

Needs attention shows only categories with current work. Each row opens the owning workflow:

Dashboard row	Destination	What to verify
Overdue or due-soon reports	Reports	Reporting cycle, owner, due date, and current draft
Pending allocations	Allocations	Source, grant, amount, status, and approval evidence
Transactions needing classification	Ledger	QuickBooks Online source line and correct GrantLink reporting treatment
Grants ending soon	Grants	Period end, closeout work, and final reporting needs
Grants missing budget	Grants	Whether a budget is required and complete
Grants missing recognized income	Grants	QuickBooks Online income links or a valid receipt entered manually outside QuickBooks Online

Ending soon means the grant period ends within 60 days. The unclassified count can be bounded and display a plus sign; open Ledger for the full queue. A zero count means no matching records were found in the dashboard query, not that every accounting or compliance issue is resolved.

Use Portfolio Positions

The Portfolio positions section lists each active grant's:

recorded spend;
award left or amount spent above the award;
funding left or spend ahead of received cash; and
restriction position.

Select a grant row to investigate it. Unknown awards remain explicit rather than being treated as zero.

Review Reporting

The Reporting section shows counts for overdue, due soon, and in progress among the open, undismissed cycles due in the next 30 days or already overdue. It then lists up to five of those cycles.

Select a report row to open its grant workspace. To work across all reports, use the overdue or due-soon row in Needs attention, which opens Reports. An overdue row also offers Dismiss overdue notice; dismissing removes that notice from the dashboard but does not complete, submit, or delete the reporting cycle.

Grant end dates and reporting cycles are separate. The dashboard does not show arbitrary compliance checkpoints or custom milestones. See Reporting Cycles and Deadline Workflow and Tracking Milestones and Deadlines.

Investigate a Surprising Number

Read the dashboard's QuickBooks Online sync note, then open Settings > Sync and confirm the newest job in Recent activity completed without a relevant partial error.
Confirm the grant has Awarded, Active, or Closeout status and that its award amount and dates are correct.
Open the grant's Income tab and verify recognized QuickBooks Online income and manual receipts entered outside QuickBooks Online. Remove or correct duplicates in the system that owns them.
Open Allocations and verify that included expenses are approved or posted, correctly split, and dated to the expected QuickBooks Online source transaction.
Open Budget and compare its lines and total with the approved budget.
Check QuickBooks links if synced activity is missing or associated with the wrong grant.
Correct amounts, dates, accounts, vendors, or tracking values owned by QuickBooks Online in QuickBooks Online, then sync. Correct GrantLink-owned grant metadata, links, budgets, receipts, allocations, and reporting cycles in GrantLink.
Reconcile with a period-specific grant report or source ledger rather than forcing the dashboard's rolling or cumulative scope to match another period.

Verification Checklist

Before using the dashboard for a finance review, verify:

The QuickBooks Online sync note is current and Settings > Sync > Recent activity has no material unresolved error
Grant statuses and award amounts are current
Cash received reconciles to recognized grant income and non-duplicated manual receipts
Received funding coverage is understood as received cash minus direct and indirect recorded spend—not bank cash
Pending and unclassified items have been reviewed in their owning workflows
Award and restriction positions use the intended award and restriction metadata
Report-cycle dates and statuses are current
Any number used externally has been traced to the underlying grant, allocation, income, report, and QuickBooks Online evidence

Dashboard charts do not currently provide direct PNG, PDF, or CSV downloads. Export the underlying budget workbook, release register, or a clearly scoped Chat-generated data file or report instead, then reconcile it before sharing.

For allocation review, see Reviewing and Correcting Grant Allocations. For period-specific output, see Generating Funder Reports.