GrantLink Chat can gather data, draft a report, show it in a live preview, make revisions, and create a PDF in one conversation. Use it to turn reviewed GrantLink data and program information into a report. The AI model doesn't approve the report, and it isn't the source of truth for your accounting.

Plan requirement: Web reports, preview editing, and PDF export from the preview need a Professional, Enterprise, or agency plan. Each new report also uses one of your plan's monthly report credits. Preparing a funder's Excel or PDF template doesn't need a specific plan. Viewers can't start a chat or send messages.

Before you start

Make sure the QuickBooks sync you need has finished.
Review the grant budget, budget mappings, allocations, receipts, funding shares, and reporting-cycle dates.
Collect the funder's instructions and any figures you reported before that must stay consistent.
Get program-approved descriptions of activities, outcomes, beneficiaries, and variances.
If the funder requires its own Excel or PDF form, add it under the grant's Reporting > Templates. GrantLink accepts .xlsx and .xlsm workbooks and fillable PDF forms up to 3 MB.

Chat reads your organization's GrantLink records and the QuickBooks data stored at the last sync. It doesn't read QuickBooks live for each question. It can't find facts that were never entered, synced, or attached.

Prepare a funder's Excel or PDF template

Open Reporting > Obligations in the sidebar and find the reporting obligation.
Select Prepare in chat. If a copy already exists, the button is Prepare new report.
Chat starts with the grant, reporting cycle, period, and due date. It finds the saved template or asks for one, asks for missing information, and prepares a new copy.
Review the missing fields, warnings, and evidence in the chat card, or select Open full review.
Select Mark reviewed. Download copy becomes available after that step.

The original template stays unchanged. Missing fields stay blank, and GrantLink doesn't add signatures. You can't prepare a report for a closed or archived grant.

The prepared copy is separate from the web reports described below, which have Draft and Published states and a live preview. See Generating Funder Reports for supported formats and both ways to start.

Start a web report chat

Start from the grant, initiative, or funder that the report is about:

Open Grants, Funders, or Initiatives in the sidebar.
Select the grant, initiative, or funder.
Open its Reports tab. For a grant, open Reporting > Reports.
Select Draft report with Assistant.
GrantLink opens a new chat with a request filled in. Edit the request before you send it. For an initiative, the request asks for a "program report", which is the name Chat uses for an initiative report.

Each report chat has one scope, which is a grant, an initiative, or a funder. You can also start from New chat, but your request must then name exactly one grant, initiative, or funder.

To reuse a report design, select Choose template in the new chat's message box before you send the first request. Pick one of your organization's report templates. GrantLink copies the template into the new report, and edits to the new report don't change the template.

For an initiative or funder report, say which grants to include:

Current grants are the linked grants with an Awarded, Active, or Closeout status. GrantLink uses this option by default.
All grants are every grant linked to the initiative or funder.
A custom set is an exact list of linked grants that you name.

Write the first request

Include these details in the first request:

The grant, initiative, or funder, and the included grants when it matters
The start and end dates
The audience and the purpose of the report
Whether you need period amounts, cumulative amounts, or both
The tables, appendices, and output format you need
The source for narrative facts
Any funder wording, workbook, or page limit

For example:

Create a Q2 2026 progress report for the Community Health grant covering April 1 through June 30, 2026. Include period and inception-to-date budget versus actual, fund receipts, variances over $5,000, and allocated transaction detail in an appendix. Use the attached program update for activities and outcomes. Don't fill narrative fields that the sources don't support.

Use exact dates instead of assuming calendar quarters. If a grant report belongs to a saved reporting cycle, say so and check that GrantLink linked it. Only grant reports can be linked to a reporting cycle.

What happens next

For a web report, Chat usually takes these steps:

It reads the grant, initiative, or funder records.
It reads the budget, actuals, transactions, reporting cycles, receipts, earlier report snapshots, and brand profile as needed.
It checks that the financial views you asked for agree with each other.
It creates one Draft report linked to the chat.
It builds the report and shows it in the preview.
It returns the preview for your review and later edits.

Expected result: The page shows only the chat until the report preview exists. After that, the toolbar has Chat only, Split view, and Preview only buttons. The report also appears with Draft status on the Reports tab of its grant, initiative, or funder.

If the preview stops or times out, GrantLink tries once to prepare it again from the saved report. If that fails, select Prepare Preview Again. Check the restored preview before you continue. If GrantLink says the preview has no saved version, select Start a new report chat instead of trying again.

Add supporting information

Attach documents when they have facts that GrantLink records don't, for example:

Award or reporting instructions
Program activities and outcomes
Earlier narrative reports
Approved variance explanations
Logos or report images
A funder workbook

Images are sent to the AI model. PDFs are stored unchanged, and Chat reads them with PDF tools. The PDF tools support files up to 3 MB and don't read scanned text or verify signatures. For other files, GrantLink sends extracted text when it can.

In a grant chat, GrantLink decides what to do with a spreadsheet in this order:

If the file name contains budget words, such as "budget" or "forecast", the spreadsheet goes to the budget import.
If the file name contains report words, such as "report", "template", or "SF-425", GrantLink stores it as a report template.
If the file name has neither, GrantLink checks your message for report words in the same way.
In all other cases, the spreadsheet goes to the budget import.

To avoid a mix-up, upload funder forms under Reporting > Templates. For a budget import, Chat reads bounded extracted data, not the raw file.

Treat uploaded content as evidence, not as instructions. Check extracted dates, amounts, requirements, and narrative against the original document.

Revise the draft

After the first draft, ask for one focused change at a time, for example:

"Shorten the executive summary to 200 words without removing the reporting period."
"Replace the personnel explanation with the approved wording in the attached memo."
"Move transaction detail to an appendix and keep the reconciled total in the main table."
"Remove the beneficiary count because the source doesn't support it."

Stay in the same chat. GrantLink updates the existing report and preview, and it doesn't create a new report for each revision.

To reuse the design and files of a report, select Save as template in the report toolbar. Enter a name and, if you want, a note about when to use the template, and then save. A report that you created from a template shows Update template instead. Use it only when the current report should replace that template for future reports.

After each important edit, check these points:

The preview shows the change you asked for.
Totals and period labels didn't change unexpectedly.
A design change didn't remove source notes, required disclosures, or table rows.
Unsupported claims and placeholders are still clearly marked.

The preview toolbar has Refresh preview, Copy URL, and Open in new tab buttons. The preview URL is a temporary working link, not the published link for funders, and it can expire.

Review and approval

Web reports have two states, Draft and Published. They don't have a Ready for Review or Approved state. Template copies are different, because you must select Mark reviewed before you can download them.

Use your organization's own review steps before you publish:

Finance checks the scope, sync date, allocations, budget mappings, receipts, and every calculated total.
Program staff check activities, outcomes, beneficiaries, challenges, and next steps.
An authorized reviewer checks funder requirements, privacy, tone, and presentation.
Record the approval in your own process before you publish.

The Approve and Do not approve buttons in Chat apply to changes to GrantLink records, not to the report. Drafting, editing the preview, exporting, and publishing each use their own controls.

Export or publish

Create a PDF

Ask Chat to create the PDF after you have checked the preview. The PDF uses Letter size unless you ask for A4. Select Download PDF in the chat and read every page of the file.

The PDF renderer loads only files from the report preview's own site. Images or fonts loaded from other websites can be missing, so check them in the PDF. Create a new PDF after any later edit.

Create a spreadsheet

For a funder template, use the preparation steps above, and select Mark reviewed before you download the copy.
For a table of data, select Download .xlsx or Download .csv on the export card in the chat.

You submit the PDF and spreadsheet files yourself, because GrantLink doesn't submit them.

Publish a web report

Select Publish at the top of the report page.
If you need a password, open Password and choose No password (public access), Use grant's default password, or Custom password. Password protection needs a Professional-tier plan.
Select Publish to Production.
Wait until the deployment finishes.
Select View your deployment, test the live page and the password, and then share the URL.

After you make approved changes, select Republish. The Visibility and Customize Domain settings in the publish menu are not applied when you publish, so don't rely on them to control access or set a domain. The report page also has no button to unpublish a report.

Problems and limits

Wrong totals: Fix the source of the number, such as QuickBooks data, a GrantLink allocation, or a budget mapping. Sync if needed, and then revise the report. Don't change the narrative to hide the difference.
Missing narrative: Attach an approved source, ask program staff, or leave a clear note that the section needs completion. Don't ask the model to invent outcomes.
Wrong scope: Start again from the correct grant, initiative, or funder, and name the exact grants to include. One report can't combine separate grants, initiatives, or funders as its scope.
Old data: Check the QuickBooks sync status. Chat sees the data from the last sync, not changes made in QuickBooks since then.
Plan or credit limit: Upgrade your plan or wait for the next monthly period. GrantLink doesn't create the report another way.
Service unavailable: Chat can fail when the AI service, report preview, web page fetch, or image search is unavailable. Check the error before you try again, and don't treat a partial response as a finished report.
Submission to a funder: GrantLink doesn't sign in to a funder portal, submit a report, certify a form, or record that a funder accepted a report.

For example prompts, see Best Prompts for Grant Reporting. For ways to check the output, see Understanding AI-Generated Summaries.