Reporting Cycles and Deadline Workflow

A reporting cycle is a GrantLink record for a covered period, due date, report type, and workflow status. Periodic cycles created with a grant appear in dashboard deadline counts and can be linked to a generated grant report.

Reporting cycles are separate from:

• Budget periods, which organize planned and actual spending in the Budget matrix.
• Custom milestones, such as events, deliverables, compliance tasks, and internal approvals. GrantLink does not currently provide an arbitrary milestone-completion workspace.
• Published reports, which are shareable deliverables. Publishing is not funder submission or acceptance.

Before You Start

Have the authoritative award agreement or funder instructions available, including:

• Grant start and end dates
• Required reporting frequency
• The covered-period convention
• Days from each period end to its due date
• Any final or custom report deadline
• Submission method and evidence your organization must retain

You must be an authenticated organization member with write access to change grants, cycles, or reports. Read-only viewers cannot make these changes.

Configure Periodic Reporting at Grant Creation

In Reporting Schedule, choose:

• Reporting Cadence: Monthly, Quarterly, Semiannual, Annual, Final Only, or Custom
• Quarter Scheme: Calendar Quarters, Fiscal Year Quarters, or Grant Period Quarters; shown only for quarterly cadence
• Days Until Due: days after period end; shown for periodic cadences

For Monthly, Quarterly, Semiannual, or Annual, GrantLink creates cycles when the grant is first created:

1. The first cycle starts on the grant start date.
2. Cycles advance by 1, 3, 6, or 12 months according to cadence.
3. The final periodic cycle is capped at the grant end date.
4. Each due date is period end plus Days Until Due. If no offset is stored, the generator uses 30 days.
5. Annual cycles are typed as annual; other periodic cycles are interim.

Quarter-scheme boundary: The current generator stores the selected Quarter Scheme but does not use it to shift quarterly boundaries. Quarterly periods advance three months from the grant start date. Verify the generated dates against the funder's required calendar instead of relying on the scheme label.

Final Only and Custom Deadlines

Selecting Final Only or Custom does not create a visible deadline through the current grant forms:

• The forms do not expose a final-report due-date field.
• Final Only does not schedule cycle generation on grant creation.
• Custom runs the generator but does not create periodic cycles.
• A backend custom-cycle capability exists, but the current user interface does not expose a custom-cycle editor.

Do not assume those selections created a cycle. Keep final and custom obligations in your controlled deadline system unless you can verify that a reporting-cycle record exists through an available workflow.

Verify the Generated Schedule

Immediately after creating a periodic grant:

1. Open the organization dashboard.
2. Review the Reporting section for the new obligation.
3. Open the grant from the deadline row.
4. Compare every covered period and due date you can verify with the funder instructions.
5. Record any unsupported final, custom, or non-reporting deadline externally.

Changing the grant's dates, cadence, quarter scheme, or due offset regenerates untouched periodic cycles. Explicit custom cycles and cycles with work or submission history keep their own covered periods and due dates. Review the resulting schedule against the funder instructions after every correction.

Understand Deadline States

The reporting-cycle model supports:

Status	Intended meaning
Upcoming	Work has not started
Due	The cycle is due soon
Overdue	The due date has passed
In Progress	Report work has started or a report was linked
Ready for Review	Draft work is ready for review
Submitted	Submission has been recorded
Accepted	Funder acceptance has been recorded
Revision Requested	The funder requested a revision
Skipped	The cycle will not be submitted

Dashboard display is partly date-derived rather than a persisted state transition. An open cycle is treated as overdue when its due date has passed, including an In Progress cycle. Submitted, accepted, skipped, and dismissed notices are excluded from its open deadline list.

The current grant and dashboard interfaces do not expose a complete cycle list, status editor, or submission-evidence editor. Do not claim a visible Mark submitted action when it is not available.

Monitor Due Work

Use the dashboard's Reporting section to review:

• overdue cycles whose due date has passed or status is Overdue
• due soon cycles due within 30 days and not overdue
• in progress cycles with that stored status
• Up to five next reports due through the next 30 days

Selecting a row opens the grant, not a dedicated cycle or report editor.

For an overdue row, Dismiss overdue notice records who dismissed it and when, then removes it from dashboard counts. Dismissal does not change cycle status, submit a report, skip the obligation, or prove completion.

Create and Review a Report

1. Open the grant's Reports tab and select Create Report, or open Chats > New Chat.
2. Name the grant, covered period, report purpose, and funder requirements explicitly.
3. Review the financial scope, allocations, budget comparison, narrative, and any files produced.
4. Correct source QuickBooks data or GrantLink allocations first when a number is wrong, then revise or regenerate the draft.
5. Confirm the report appears under the intended grant.
6. Publish only after the required internal review.

There is no visible reporting-cycle selector in New Chat. The AI report tools can look up a cycle and pass its ID when creating a report. When that succeeds, GrantLink verifies that the cycle and report belong to the same grant and moves the cycle to In Progress. Prompt wording alone does not guarantee linkage, so verify the relationship rather than assuming that mentioning a deadline linked it.

Only grant reports can be linked to reporting cycles. Updating a linked report can also set its cycle to In Progress; review the cycle context before relying on a later status.

Publish, Submit, and Retain Evidence

These are distinct actions:

1. Create/revise prepares a GrantLink report.
2. Publish queues deployment of the reviewed report as a shareable web artifact.
3. Submit sends the required deliverable through the funder's process.
4. Accept records the funder's response.

Publishing does not submit to the funder and does not update a reporting cycle to Submitted or Accepted.

The cycle data model can retain submission time and user, method, confirmation number, internal notes, and funder feedback. Because the current UI does not expose a complete editor for that evidence, retain portal receipts, emails, confirmation numbers, attachments, and acceptance notices in your organization's controlled document system.

Corrections and Edge Cases

• Wrong generated dates: Do not rely on editing grant settings alone; existing cycles are not regenerated. Keep the correct deadline externally while the UI cannot safely correct it.
• Final or custom report: Verify a cycle exists. If not, use your external deadline system.
• Wrong report numbers: Correct QuickBooks or allocation data at its source, sync if needed, and revise the report.
• Report linked to the wrong context: Confirm the report's grant. Cycle linkage requires the same grant, but prompt text is not proof of linkage.
• Overdue but still required: Continue the report and submission workflow. Dismissal only suppresses the notice.
• No longer required: Do not use dismissal as a skipped/completed state. Preserve the funder decision externally when no cycle editor is available.
• Revision requested: Revise the report and retain the new submission evidence; publishing and cycle status remain separate.

Important Boundary

The award agreement and funder instructions remain authoritative for periods, deadlines, formats, submission, and acceptance. GrantLink currently supports generated periodic cycle records, dashboard deadline triage, optional report linkage, publish activity, and backend status/evidence fields. It does not currently provide a complete user-facing cycle-management workspace, arbitrary milestone tracking, dedicated cycle-linked evidence attachments, or proof that a funder received or accepted a report.