Tracking Grants: Recording Grant Income and Spending

Grant Tracking lets you follow each grant from award to final report: how much was awarded, how much has arrived, what you've spent against it, and what's left. Behind the scenes GoodBooks also handles the donor-restriction accounting (ASC 958) for you — when you spend grant money, the "release from restriction" entries are created automatically.

Availability: Foundation plan and up. Your plan sets how many active grants you can have at once (Foundation: 5, Core: 50, Pro: unlimited) — inactive grants don't count toward the limit.

This article is the quick reference. For the full start-to-finish story — award letter, receipts, spending, and the final report to the funder — see The Grant Lifecycle.

Setting up a grant

From the left menu, go to Donations → Grants and click Add Grant.

Recording grant money coming in

When the funder's check arrives, enter it as a regular donation with the funder as the donor. In the campaign designation table on the donation form you'll see a Grant column — pick the grant there. That links the revenue to the grant so it shows up in grant reports.

Two tips:

• Designate grant gifts to a campaign whose gifts are donor-restricted (a campaign that posts to a with donor restrictions revenue account). That's what lets GoodBooks track the restricted balance and release it automatically as you spend.
• The Grant column only appears on the full donation form — Batch Gift Entry keeps its grid simple and doesn't have one. Enter grant checks individually.

Recording spending against a grant

When you enter the spending in your checkbook register, each expense line has a Spend Against selector listing your grants (and campaigns). Pick the grant the money was spent from.

That's the whole job. GoodBooks:

1. Tags the expense to the grant, so it appears in grant reports, and
2. If the grant's money is donor-restricted, automatically adds the matching "Released from restrictions" lines to the entry — moving the amount from restricted to unrestricted net assets, capped at what the grant actually has available. You never book releases by hand, and the release lines are kept out of the grant reports so nothing is double-counted.

Watching the numbers

Two reports cover grants — see Grant Reports:

• Grant Balance Report — one line per grant: award, revenue received, spent, and remaining.
• Income Statement by Grant — your revenue and expense accounts as rows with a column per grant.

When the grant ends

Open the grant and uncheck Active (or use the inactivate button on the grant list). Inactive grants disappear from the Spend Against and donation pickers but keep all their history and still appear on the Grant Balance report — your final grant report doesn't go anywhere.

A grant that has transactions tied to it can't be deleted, only inactivated. Deleting is reserved for grants created by mistake that were never used.

Good to know

• One grant per expense line. If a purchase covers two grants, split it into two lines and pick a grant on each.
• If a grant runs dry, spending tagged to it simply stops generating releases — the expense still records normally.
• Grant reports include grants with no activity yet, so a newly awarded grant is never invisible.