GrantLink Chat is an assistant that works inside your organization's GrantLink data. It can answer questions, explain budget and allocation problems, prepare exports and reports, and make supported record changes after you approve them.

Important: Chat can use only the records, tools, and files available in the current conversation. It does not replace finance, legal, compliance, or program judgment, so review its results before you rely on them.

Before you start

Check these points before you open a chat:

You are signed in to the correct organization. Chat reads and changes records only in that organization.
You have the Admin or Member role. Viewers can open existing chats, but they can't start a chat or send messages.
QuickBooks is connected and synced if your question depends on accounting data.
You know whether you want an answer, a file, a report, or a change to a GrantLink record.
Someone can review any financial, compliance, or funder-facing result.

Chats belong to the organization, not to one person. Other members of your organization can open your chats and read the messages. Don't enter passwords, bank credentials, or personal data that the task doesn't need.

Open Chat

Start a general conversation

Under Chats in the sidebar, select New chat.
Enter your goal, the records you mean, the dates, and the output you want.

Use a general chat for questions about the whole organization, setup help, diagnostics, and exports that are not tied to one page.

Start from a page

On supported pages, select Ask GrantLink. Chat receives the current page and its context. On some tables, you can select grants or other records and send them to Chat as the exact set to work on. On the grant budget, selected cells carry their row and period.

The page context tells Chat what the request is about. It does not approve a change.

Start a report

Open a grant, initiative, or funder and go to its Reports tab. For a grant, open Reporting > Reports. Select Draft report with Assistant. The new chat is scoped to that one grant, initiative, or funder. See Creating Reports with GrantLink Chat.

What Chat can read

Depending on the question, Chat has tools that read:

The organization profile, funders, initiatives, grants, and upcoming deadlines
Grant budgets, actuals, budget mappings, budget snapshots, and variance checks
Allocations, uncategorized or unallocated transactions, and allocation checks
Fund receipts, funding shares, and reporting cycles
QuickBooks data synced into GrantLink, such as accounts, transactions, vendors, classes, income, cash flow, and sync status
Report templates, earlier report snapshots, and your organization's branding
Files you upload and records you selected on a page

Chat doesn't get every tool on every turn. It gets the tools that fit the request, and every lookup stays inside your organization.

QuickBooks data: Most Chat accounting answers use the QuickBooks data that GrantLink stored at the last sync. They are not live reads from QuickBooks. Check the sync status when you need current figures. If the source data in QuickBooks is wrong, fix it in QuickBooks and sync again.

What Chat can produce

Chat can return:

Answers and explanations based on tool results
Checks of budgets, allocations, mappings, syncs, and accounting setup
Download cards for Excel and CSV exports
A prepared copy of a funder's Excel or PDF template saved on a grant
Draft web reports for a grant, initiative, or funder on qualifying plans
PDF copies of report previews
A link to connect QuickBooks, which a person must complete
Suggested next prompts

Exports, PDFs, and reports are files that you review and send yourself. Chat doesn't submit anything to a funder portal, sign a certification, or request a draw.

What Chat can change

Chat can change some GrantLink records. The way a change is applied depends on the type of change:

Change	What happens
Organization profile fields: name, fiscal-year start month, timezone, and default indirect rate	Chat applies the change directly, and GrantLink records it in the audit log.
Most record changes, such as creating or updating grants, funders, and initiatives, allocating transactions, editing a grant budget, setting budget mappings, and starting a QuickBooks sync	Chat explains the change, and you select Approve or Do not approve before anything changes.

When Chat asks for approval, follow these steps:

Read Chat's explanation of the exact change. No record has changed yet.
Select Approve to apply that change, or Do not approve to stop it.
Check the result that Chat returns.

An approval applies to one change only. If the request changes, Chat must ask again. For budget edits, GrantLink rejects the edit if the budget changed after Chat read it, and Chat must propose a new edit.

An approval doesn't approve a report, publish a report, or allow other future changes. It also doesn't give you any permission that your role doesn't have. Chat doesn't write to QuickBooks. QuickBooks writeback, where your organization allows it, happens on its own review screens.

Write useful prompts

A useful prompt names these things:

The record or the exact records you selected
The exact dates or period
Whether you want period amounts, inception-to-date amounts, or both
The answer, action, or file you need
Anything to exclude, and the sources to use

Less useful: "How much did we spend?"

More useful: "For the Youth Services grant, show allocated personnel spending from January 1 through March 31, 2026. Compare it with the budget for the same periods and list uncategorized amounts. Answer in Chat and don't change anything."

Less useful: "Fix the budget."

More useful: "Find out why the Community Health grant's Q2 personnel actuals don't appear on the correct budget line. Read the budget mappings and allocations, explain the cause, and describe any change before you make it."

Stay in the same chat when the next request depends on earlier results. In a report chat, edit requests update the same report. Start a new chat for a different grant, initiative, funder, or deliverable.

Attach files

Use the attachment control in the chat input to add award documents, reporting instructions, approved narrative, images, PDFs, CSV files, and spreadsheets.

GrantLink handles each type of file in a different way:

Images are sent to the AI model.
PDFs are stored unchanged. Chat reads their text, pages, and form fields with PDF tools. The PDF tools support files up to 3 MB and don't read scanned text or verify signatures.
In a grant chat, a spreadsheet goes to the budget import unless its file name or your message says it is a report template. Chat then reads the budget through bounded extracted data, not the raw file.
In other chats, spreadsheets are stored unchanged, and Chat reads them with workbook tools.
For other documents, GrantLink sends extracted text when it can. The text can be cut off, or extraction can fail.

Uploaded files are saved in GrantLink, but they aren't added to a grant's documents automatically. Ask Chat to attach a file to a grant if you want it there, and approve that change.

Compare the facts Chat takes from a file with the original before you use them for setup, compliance, or funder reports.

Web pages and images

Chat can use a few outside sources:

It can open a public web page that you name. It can read HTML and plain-text pages only, and it can't open local or private network addresses.
It can search Unsplash for report images when image search is set up.
It can read your organization's website to update your website address and branding, after you approve the change.

Chat can't search the web in general, so give it the exact public URL you want it to read. It can't sign in to funder portals or read pages that need a login. Web content can be incomplete or wrong, and it doesn't override your records or the funder's documents.

Model and conversation limits

GrantLink sends Chat requests through Vercel AI Gateway to an OpenAI model. GrantLink can change the model, so don't depend on the behavior of one model.

GrantLink limits how Chat is used:

Each user can send up to 20 chat requests per minute.
Each plan includes a monthly number of AI credits.
Each turn is limited to 20 tool steps.
Chat sends the model up to the 50 most recent messages. In a long chat, older messages stay visible to you, but the model may not see them.

In a long chat, repeat the scope and limits that matter, and check the latest tool result instead of earlier answers.

The model can misread a request, use the wrong tool, make a math error, or write confident text that the data doesn't support. GrantLink tells the model not to make things up, but that instruction doesn't guarantee correct output. Use the checks in Understanding AI-Generated Summaries.

Privacy and security

GrantLink gets your organization from your sign-in, not from the AI model.
Each record read and change checks that the record belongs to your organization. Viewers can't make changes through Chat.
Chat tools don't return QuickBooks connection credentials to the model.
GrantLink asks AI Gateway to use only providers that don't train on your prompts and that have zero data retention agreements. If no such provider is available, the request fails.
Other members of your organization can read your chats.
GrantLink's Privacy Policy describes how GrantLink retains and deletes data.

For board and vendor-review questions, see AI, Security, and Vendor Risk FAQ for Boards.