eGrants

The primary way you interact with the Big Faceless CNCS bureaucracy is through something called eGrants. It's an online portal for manage your federal grant as well as the reporting requirements for the grant.

Luckily for you, almost all of the bugs have been wrung out of eGrants in recent years. It apepars to be performing quite well these days with minimal glitches.
One caveat: If you wait until the last minute to file your grants or required reports, eGrants will be running slowly and might crash on you. Why? Well, because all the other procrastinators are using eGrants on the same day you are! Avoid late minute use of eGrants at all costs! File your stuff well before the stampede takes place. Trust me, you will really regret waiting until the last minute to use eGrants. I mean, what the heck? You're going to have to file your stuff someday anyway. So, why not early? Novel idea, eh?

By now, you probably already have an eGrants logon and password and you've probably peeked inside and run screaming for the door. Don't worry, it's really not all that complex. It might look somewhat intimidating but it's really a piece of cake to get accustomed to eGrants. There are some very quirky behaviors and procedures on eGrants but what software doesn't have weird aspects?

Here's what CNCS says that eGrants does:

Submission and tracking grant applications and concept papers;
On-line grant application peer review;
Negotiating and awarding grants and cooperative agreements;
Managing grants and cooperative agreements including processing amendments, and continuations;
Creating, submitting and editing your recruitment listings;
Selecting applicants and searching for applicants;
Approving project transportation (V-81) forms (VISTA only); and
Financial Status and Progress Reporting.

It's this last one that will consume most of your time in using eGrants. You will only need to file one grant renewal a year. However, you need to file bi-annual Progress reports plus one other gem of dubious value called a PPVA. Here at EICAP, the CPA takes care of filing the bi-annual financial reports. He will only need you to provide the bi-annual value of your in-kind. (In-kind is the subject of the next blog post.)

The eGrants will always show a bunch of outdated grants. Ignore them. Work only with the most latest grant showing on the portal. The other ones listed have no meaning or relevance to you whatsoever. You may also note that a lot of names including my own name are still listed on eGrants. Don't worry about it. The eGrants system keeps everyone's names seemingly forever and there appears to be no way to delete them. None of us are going to come along and mess with your stuff. Nope--that's easily the LAST thing on any past administrator's mind.

We will discuss the eGrants forms and procedures in later blog posts. For now, we want to assure you that eGrants is really easy. If you believe it's easy, then it's easy. If you believe it's hard, then it's hard. The choice is yours.