Grants management software centralizes the entire funding lifecycle in a single system, from opportunity research and application development through post-award compliance and closeout. If you’re evaluating grants management software right now, you’re probably doing it under less-than-ideal conditions. Staffing is thin, federal funding priorities have changed more in the last two years than in the previous decade, and the 2024 Uniform Grant Guidance revisions added new requirements to an already demanding compliance environment.
And yet, according to Euna Solutions’® 2026 State of Grants Management & Technology Report, 44% of grants teams are still managing their portfolios in spreadsheets or a mix of tools, with 47% reporting reduced capacity to do so.
Staffing Shortages Are Not Getting Better
Grants departments are operating with limited staff. The 2026 State of Grants Management report shows almost half are operating with reduced capacity, and the 2025 report found that in most organizations, only have one to three people cover the entire portfolio, including research, applications, award administration, subrecipient oversight, reporting, and closeout.
Add in that those same teams are managing portfolios that have grown. Over 65% of respondents oversee grant portfolios exceeding $20 million. Spreadsheets and calendar reminders don’t hold up at that scale.
The operational impact of this shows up in the numbers. The report found that 39% of grants professionals spend up to half of their working week on manual work such as data entry, document collection, and reporting, while 14% spend more than 75% of their time on these activities. Meanwhile, 77% report that compliance oversight has increased in the past year, with reporting and documentation requirements ranking as the most burdensome part of their job.
These teams don’t lack skill or commitment. They’re working with tools that weren’t built for what they’re being asked to handle.
What Grants Management Software Needs to Cover
Not all public sector grant management platforms are the same, and the differences matter when you’re evaluating solutions.
Most platforms handle one or two phases reasonably well, such as intake, post-award reporting, or subrecipient payments. The rest of the process relies on workarounds or entirely separate systems. For a small grants team managing the same award across multiple systems, that’s not much of a process improvement.
A full lifecycle grants management platform covers the entire process: identifying and researching funding opportunities, building and submitting applications, managing pre-award approvals, administering awards, monitoring subrecipients, tracking expenses against budgets, generating compliance reports, and closing out awards.
Beyond full-lifecycle coverage, you should prioritize a few critical features during a software evaluation:
Integration with your financial systems. Grant expenses have to reconcile against general ledger records. If that reconciliation happens manually through exports, imports, and re-keying data, you’re adding work and introducing error risk. Look for a grants management system for state and local governments that includes pre-built connectors to the ERP you’re already running. The question to ask vendors isn’t whether they can integrate; it’s how many of their customers use the integration and how it handles edge cases such as budget modifications and multi-year awards.
Configurable without custom development. Government grants offices don’t all run the same way. A statewide implementation serving 25 agencies needs different process configurations than a county team managing a handful of federal awards. Platforms built on a single codebase that allow configuration without custom code are more adaptable and lower risk to maintain over time.
Audit-readiness as a byproduct, not a project. When an auditor asks for documentation on a subrecipient’s reporting period from 18 months ago, the answer shouldn’t require a search across email threads and shared drives. That documentation should already exist in the system as a natural result of how the team managed the award. Government grants compliance software that embeds documentation into the workflow (rather than offering it as an add-on reporting function) makes a major operational difference.
Support for both grant seekers and grant makers. Many state agencies distribute funding to local governments while simultaneously applying for federal awards. Running those two functions in separate systems creates visibility issues and doubles the administrative workload. A public sector grant management platform that handles both sides of the funding relationship in one place is worth prioritizing.
Optimizing Grant Research and Opportunity Identification
One of the more important findings from the 2025 report is that grants professionals without digital tools spend an average of 17 hours per month just researching funding opportunities. Some grant professionals report spending up to 100 hours monthly on manual research. That’s time not spent on applications, compliance, or strategic work.
90% of respondents said they rely on federal, state, or local government websites to find opportunities, which can mean many browser tabs and a high risk of missing something.
A built-in research database drastically changes the process. Euna Grants, powered by AmpliFund, includes a database of more than 25,000 active grant opportunities, curated by an in-house research team. It also includes a library of over 1,300 previously funded applications. This database is a resource most grants teams don’t otherwise have access to, and one that can meaningfully improve the competitiveness of new submissions.
Automated grant alerts handle monitoring; advanced eligibility and subject-matter filters narrow down results for better matching; and built-in sharing tools get them in front of the right program staff without a manual handoff every time.
What Purpose-Built Means, And Why It Matters
“Purpose-built for the public sector” is a phrase that appears in a lot of vendor marketing, but its definition is worth clarifying.
A purpose-built platform has a data model designed for fund accounting, not a commercial CRM or project management tool someone reconfigured. Award tracking handles period of performance, indirect cost rates, subrecipient tiers, and Uniform Grant Guidance compliance as native to the process, not added as custom fields. Reporting templates are built around the formats required by federal agencies, state auditors, and GFOA.
A CRM modified to track grants will struggle with all of this, and the workarounds accumulate over time. By the time a regulatory change breaks something, the documentation gaps have been there for months.
Custom-built grants management solutions have their own tradeoffs. You can configure them to your current processes, but they’re expensive to maintain, slow to deploy, and difficult to update as federal requirements change. The organization bears the development cost of keeping the system current rather than the vendor.
Purpose-built, configurable solutions using a single codebase, tailored to your process without custom development, offer faster deployment, lower total cost of ownership, and a vendor that absorbs the regulatory change burden.
What Is the Best Grant Management Software for Local Governments?
Euna Grants is designed for state and local governments looking for a full-lifecycle grants management solution; it is one of the few platforms built to handle both sides of the grants process. Grant seekers use it to research opportunities, develop applications, and manage post-award compliance and reporting. Grant makers use it to design funding programs, manage application intake and review, distribute awards, and oversee subrecipients. Both functions run in a single configuration environment, which matters for state agencies operating in both roles.
On the integration side, Euna Grants has prebuilt connectors for Munis, Oracle Financials, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Workday, Springbrook, and other financial systems that most government agencies already use. Expense transactions sync daily or weekly via API or SFTP, eliminating manual reconciliation that takes up staff time.
The platform currently manages more than $90 billion in grant funds across 200,000+ grants, serving 3,400+ communities, including state, local, and tribal governments, higher education institutions, healthcare organizations, and nonprofits. It’s been in the public sector grants management space for more than 20 years—long enough that the implementation methodology, compliance logic, and ERP integrations have been tested across a wide range of organizations.
For agencies evaluating grant management software for government, the specifics matter. Euna Grants is a purpose-built grants management software for state, local, and tribal governments. It covers the full lifecycle in a single configurable platform, has a research database of 25,000+ active opportunities, a library of over 1,300 previously funded applications, a configurable single-code-base SaaS model, and proven integrations with the financial systems already in use. That’s not the same as a platform built around one phase of the lifecycle with spreadsheets filling the gaps.
Case Studies: Improving Compliance and Efficiency with Euna Grants
The New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration built a centralized process for managing multi-program funding statewide, replacing a disconnected approach that made cross-agency coordination harder than it needed to be.
The City of Chattanooga, Tennessee, had the same problem many municipalities have: each department managed its own grants in its own way, with no shared view of what was happening across the organization. Centralizing grants management across departments improved grantee oversight and reduced compliance risk.
Bingham Healthcare in Idaho replaced manual grant tracking with a single platform and tripled the number of active grant applications they manage annually. The grants team, which started as a department of one, is now 100% compliant and audit-ready, securing multiple grants averaging $100K+ each year instead of spending that time chasing down paperwork.
The City of Detroit faced significant audit risk due to a high volume of grants across multiple departments. They used Euna Grants to reduce those audit findings by 88% and achieved three consecutive years of balanced budgets and operating surpluses, while being awarded over $202 million in grants and donations.
Before Buying Grant Management Software
80% of grants professionals are concerned about funding stability over the next one to three years, and 40% are already applying for more grants to fill revenue gaps. Concerns regarding implementation and software costs often prevent agencies from adopting digital grant management tools.
On implementation, the question isn’t whether implementation requires time and effort (it does), but whether the platform’s methodology and track record give you confidence that the transition will be managed well. On cost, the calculation needs to include what manual processes are costing your organization, including research, reconciliation, documentation reconstruction, and compliance issues. Often, these costs exceed the price of software.
Agencies that are still running grants on spreadsheets carry more risk than they did five years ago. The compliance environment is stricter, the competition for funding is higher, and the staffing conditions that could reduce that risk aren’t improving.
The right public sector grant management platform doesn’t eliminate that pressure, but it gives grants teams the infrastructure to manage it, and a record of what happened, when, and why, when it’s time to prove it to an auditor.
Frequently Asked Questions about Grant Management Software for Government
What should governments look for when selecting grants management software?
Look for a platform that covers the full grant lifecycle in a single system, integrates with your existing ERP without custom development, and supports both grant seekers and grant makers. Compliance documentation, subrecipient monitoring, and audit trails should be embedded in the workflows, not added after the fact.
Does Euna Grants support both grant seekers and grant makers?
Yes. Most platforms are built for one side of the funding relationship. Euna Grants, powered by AmpliFund, handles both agencies applying for external funding and agencies distributing awards to subrecipients on a single platform. For state agencies operating in both roles, that matters.
What financial systems does Euna Grants integrate with?
Euna Grants has prebuilt connectors for Munis, Oracle Financials, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Workday, Springbrook, and others. Expense transactions sync daily or weekly via API or SFTP.
How long does implementation take?
The implementation timeline depends on where an agency is starting in the grants lifecycle and how many programs are in scope. Euna Grants can configure individual programs for deployment within weeks, with full lifecycle implementation typically running three to five months.
What does full lifecycle grants management include?
Research and opportunity identification, pre-award application development, award administration, subrecipient monitoring, financial reporting, and closeout are all managed in one system rather than across spreadsheets and disconnected tools.
Is Euna Grants configurable for statewide implementation?
Yes. The State of Illinois runs Euna Grants across 25+ agencies, with statewide process standards and agency-level workflow configuration running on the same platform.
Does Euna Grants help with federal grants compliance?
Yes. The platform tracks Uniform Grant Guidance requirements, maintains complete audit trails, and manages subrecipient monitoring documentation as part of the standard workflow rather than as a separate reporting project.
