Understanding GrantLink Dashboards

The Dashboard is an organization-wide finance overview. Use it to assess award and cash posture, see what changed, 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 Expense Position

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

Grant measure	Current calculation
Lifetime expenses	Effective approved or posted operating-expense allocations attributed to the grant
Award remaining	Award amount minus lifetime expenses
Percent of award allocated to expenses	Lifetime expenses divided by award amount × 100

The percentage is unavailable when the award is missing or zero. Award remaining can be negative when effective expenses exceed the award.

The cumulative chart groups dated allocations by their QuickBooks transaction date and accumulates net expense amount over time. It separates activity before, within, and after the grant period. Undated allocations remain in Lifetime expenses but are disclosed under Timeline coverage instead of being placed on an invented date.

The Expense breakdown groups attributed spending by the grant's mapped QuickBooks dimension and reports Unattributed expenses separately. Open Budget for categories, period budgets, actuals, remaining amounts, and variance. Award utilization and budget utilization can differ when the entered budget does not equal the award or remains incomplete.

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 Financial Posture and Cash Runway

The top panel shows four cumulative measures:

Measure	Current calculation	What it is not
Net cash position	Funds received minus approved or posted grant allocations	A bank or QuickBooks Online cash-account balance
Total awarded	Award amounts for Awarded, Active, and Closeout grants	Cash received or total budget
Funds received	Recognized QuickBooks Online income plus manual receipts entered outside QuickBooks Online for included grants	A promise, receivable, or raw bank-deposit total
Unreceived award	Total awarded minus Funds received	An automatically validated receivable balance

Beside the posture figures, Cash runway shows actual grant cash movement and a projection at current pace. Avg inflow / mo and Avg burn / mo use the last six completed calendar months. Net / mo is average inflow minus average burn. GrantLink extends that pace six months forward and may show an estimated run-out month when the trend is declining.

This is a trend projection, not a committed cash forecast. It does not model scheduled draws, reimbursement timing, unpaid obligations, unrestricted cash, or future awards. If there is not enough receipt or allocation history, the dashboard says it cannot project a runway.

Review What Moved

What moved compares two rolling 30-day periods. The exact current and prior date ranges appear above:

• Grant spend uses approved or posted allocation amounts, dated by the linked QuickBooks Online transaction.
• Funds received uses recognized receipt dates.
• Notable changes ranks grants by the size of the change. Spend rows may also identify the budget category that changed most.

Select a notable grant to open its Activity tab. The displayed percentage is period-over-period movement; when the prior period is zero and the current period is nonzero, GrantLink displays a 100% increase rather than an infinite percentage.

There is no custom date control in What moved. Do not treat this rolling comparison as a calendar-month close, grant-period total, or funder-report scope.

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 and Grants to Watch

The Portfolio section includes:

• Award utilization: approved or posted allocations as a percentage of total awarded.
• Budget utilization: approved or posted allocations as a percentage of the entered GrantLink budget, with budget remaining.
• Top grants by award: up to five grants, with Spent and award Remaining.
• Grants to watch: a bounded list of grants nearest their end dates and grants with at least 80% of budget spent, with Budget remaining.

Select a grant row to investigate it. Select All grants for the complete portfolio. The watch list is intentionally a glance view: it can include a grant that is not within 60 days of ending, and a grant absent from the list can still require review.

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

1. 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.
2. Confirm the grant has Awarded, Active, or Closeout status and that its award amount and dates are correct.
3. 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.
4. Open Allocations and verify that included expenses are approved or posted, correctly split, and dated to the expected QuickBooks Online source transaction.
5. Open Budget and compare its lines and total with the approved budget.
6. Check QuickBooks links if synced activity is missing or associated with the wrong grant.
7. 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.
8. 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
• Funds received reconciles to recognized grant income and non-duplicated manual receipts
• Net cash position is understood as received grant funds minus approved or posted allocations—not bank cash
• Pending and unclassified items have been reviewed in their owning workflows
• Budget and award utilization use the intended GrantLink budget and award 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.