Two structures, and only one of them is yours
Your books are organised the way your organisation works: by department, by activity, by the accounts your bookkeeper set up years ago. That structure is fine and it is not the one a funder asked for.
A grant agreement carries a budget — a set of headings with amounts against them, agreed before the work started and often written by someone who does not know how you keep your ledger. A drawdown is a request to release money against costs already incurred, described in those headings.
So every claim is a translation exercise. Not a difficult one conceptually, but one where the raw material — the invoices, the receipts, the bank lines — sits in a different shape from the answer.
This page is about making that translation repeatable, so that the fourth claim takes an afternoon instead of the three weeks the first one took.
What a drawdown actually asks for
Funders differ in wording and agree almost completely on substance. Five things, in some order.
| They ask for | Which means | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Expenditure by heading | Their budget lines, not yours | Your costs, re-grouped |
| Within the period | Their dates, not your month-end | A date rule you apply consistently |
| Eligible costs only | Excluding what the agreement excludes | A screening pass |
| Evidence on request | The invoice behind each figure | Documents, findable |
| A certification | Someone signing that it is true | A person, not a system |
The last row is worth noticing because it never automates and should not. Someone is putting their name to the claim, and that person needs to be able to look at any figure in it and see what it is made of.
That requirement drives everything else on this page. A claim assembled in a way nobody can take apart again is a claim that cannot honestly be certified, however quickly it was produced.
Their headings against your ledger
The mapping between a funder’s budget headings and your own accounts is the piece of work that people redo every quarter without noticing that they are redoing it.
It should be written down once, as a table, and kept. Not because it is complicated — because the person who works it out in their head this quarter is not necessarily the person doing it next quarter, and two people reasoning independently will produce two different claims.
| Typical funder heading | What it usually covers | Where it gets argued about |
|---|---|---|
| Staff costs | Salaries of people on the programme | Part-time apportionment |
| Direct delivery | Bought-in services and materials | Whether a thing is delivery or overhead |
| Equipment | Items above a threshold | Where the threshold sits |
| Travel | Journeys for the funded work | Subsistence and what counts |
| Overheads | A percentage or an agreed list | Almost always |
The right-hand column is where the mapping earns its keep. Every one of those disputes is settled once, with the funder if necessary, and then never revisited — provided the decision is written next to the mapping rather than remembered.
The mechanism for attaching a heading to each extracted row is the same one used for projects and departments, described on dimension tagging. A grant is one more dimension; what makes it different is the consequence of getting it wrong.
Four things that hold up a claim
In the order they cost time, which is not the order people expect.
Finding the documents.The figures are usually available. The invoices behind them are in email, in a shared drive, in someone’s downloads folder. This is the single largest consumer of claim-preparation time and the one nobody budgets for.
Deciding what falls in the period.An invoice dated the last day of the quarter, paid three weeks later, for work done the month before. Three defensible answers, and the wrong one is whichever differs from last quarter’s.
Splitting shared costs. A supplier who works across two funded programmes and your unfunded work. Every claim needs a defensible share, and inventing the basis afresh each time makes the claims incomparable.
Answering the query afterwards. A funder asks about one line. If answering means reconstructing how the figure was built, that is a day — and it arrives weeks after everyone has moved on.
All four have the same root: the claim was produced as a number rather than as a set of rows that can be taken apart again.
Extract the costs behind a claim
Upload an invoice — supplier, dates, net, VAT, total and every line come back as rows, with the sum of the lines checked against the document total.
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How it works
1 · Upload the period
Invoices, receipts and statements for the quarter, up to 100 files at once. Scans go through OCR first.
2 · Read the documents
Supplier, dates, net, VAT, total and line detail — by meaning, so a new supplier needs no setup.
3 · Check the arithmetic
Lines against totals, VAT against rate. A misread figure in a claim is worse than a missing one.
4 · Apply the period rule
Your chosen date convention, applied to everything, with anything near the boundary flagged.
5 · Assign headings
Rules where a supplier always maps to one heading; a decision where it genuinely varies.
6 · Export the schedule
Excel or CSV grouped by heading, with the source document and page on every row.
Step 6 is the one that pays for itself later. A schedule where each figure carries its document is a schedule you can defend in a phone call rather than in a week.
The period boundary, and why claims come back
More claims are queried over dates than over eligibility, and the reason is that three dates exist for every cost and nobody agreed which one counts.
| Convention | Argument for it | Where it bites |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice date | Matches your ledger | Claim before you have paid |
| Payment date | Matches your bank | Cost sits in the wrong quarter |
| Date of delivery | Matches the activity | Rarely on the document |
Which one to use is your funder’s call and it is usually stated in the agreement. What matters more than the choice is that it does not drift: a cost claimed on invoice date in one quarter and on payment date in the next is either claimed twice or not at all, and both are worse than picking the less convenient convention.
One practical habit removes most of the risk. Flag everything within a week of the boundary and look at it deliberately, rather than letting a sort order decide. It is a handful of rows per quarter and it is where the errors live.
Keep a note of what you claimed at each boundary, too. The question “did this one go in last time” comes up every single quarter, and answering it from a record takes seconds while answering it from memory takes an afternoon and is sometimes wrong.
Matched funding and your own contribution
Where a grant covers part of the cost and you cover the rest, the part you cover usually has to be evidenced on the same terms as the part you claim. That surprises people, and it surprises them late.
The practical consequence is that there is no such thing as a cost you can be sloppy about because you are not claiming it. If it counts towards your contribution, it needs the same document, the same heading and the same period treatment.
In-kind contributions — donated time, donated space, volunteer hours — are a separate category with their own rules, and those rules come from your agreement rather than from any general principle. What is worth knowing is that they need a record made at the time. Reconstructing volunteer hours at the end of a quarter is not evidence, and funders know it.
In the schedule this is one more column, not a separate exercise: each row is claimed, matched, or neither. Keeping all three in the same table is what makes the totals add up to something you can check.
One invoice, several funders
An organisation running two or three funded programmes will have suppliers who serve all of them. A single invoice then belongs partly to each, and the split has to be defensible to two funders who will never see each other’s claim.
Three rules make that safe. Split at line level where the lines allow it, because a line-level split is a fact about the document rather than a judgement. Record the basis in words — hours, headcount, floor area, an agreed percentage — so it can be explained rather than defended. Make the shares sum to the invoice, and check it, because the failure mode here is claiming 60% to one funder and 60% to another.
That last one sounds like it could never happen and is the single most serious error in this area. It happens when two people prepare two claims from the same pile of documents without a shared record of what has been allocated where.
Keeping every allocation in one table — all funders, all programmes, all periods — is what prevents it. The mechanics of splitting a line are on dimension tagging; the eligibility side is on eligible cost screening.
What arrives after you have claimed
Suppliers invoice on their own schedule, which means costs belonging to a claimed period keep arriving after the claim has gone in. This is normal and it needs a convention rather than a panic.
Most funders allow a late cost to be included in the following claim, provided it falls within the overall grant period and the treatment is consistent. Some do not. This is worth establishing at the start rather than discovering with an invoice in your hand.
Credit notes are the mirror case and the more dangerous one. A credit against a cost you have already claimed reduces what you were entitled to, and a funder finding that before you do is a materially worse conversation than one you raise yourself.
The habit that covers both: keep the claimed period open in your own records for a set number of weeks after submission, and look at what landed in it. That is ten minutes, once a quarter, and it is the difference between correcting your own figures and having them corrected for you.
Your first claim, and why it is not representative
The first claim of a new grant costs several times what the fourth will, and knowing that in advance prevents two bad conclusions: that the process is unworkable, and that it will always be this expensive.
Most of the cost is one-off. Reading the agreement properly, building the heading mapping, deciding the date convention, writing the first rules. None of that recurs, and all of it is what makes the fourth claim an afternoon.
The documents will be the worst they will ever be. Costs incurred before anyone set up the coding have to be reconstructed, and reconstruction is the most expensive work in this area. Every subsequent quarter starts from a table rather than from a folder.
Ask more questions than feels comfortable. A funder answering four questions in month two is routine and expected. The same four questions in month eleven, attached to a claim, read as a problem rather than as diligence.
Over-invest deliberately. The first two claims of a relationship set how closely everything afterwards gets read. That is a poor place to economise, and the extra care costs a day once rather than scrutiny for years.
A useful measure of whether the one-off work actually landed: at the second claim, how much of it did you have to redo? If the answer is most of it, the decisions were made but never written down.
Six mistakes
Rebuilding the heading mapping each quarter
Two people reasoning independently produce two different claims from the same costs. Write it down once.
Letting the date convention drift
A cost claimed on invoice date one quarter and payment date the next is either duplicated or lost.
Producing a total instead of rows
The figure is fine until someone asks what is in it, and then it costs a day to answer.
Splitting shared costs by feel
An unrecorded basis cannot be explained a year later, and the same supplier gets split differently each time.
Treating matched funding casually
It usually needs the same evidence as claimed cost, and that is discovered late by the people who assumed otherwise.
Closing the period the day you submit
Late invoices and credit notes keep arriving. Look at what landed before assuming the claim was final.
What this is not
Not a submission channel
Claims go into the funder's own portal or template. This produces the schedule and the rows behind it; a person submits and certifies.
Not a reading of your agreement
It has no access to your grant conditions. It applies rules you record and shows what falls outside them.
Not an eligibility ruling
Whether a cost is genuinely eligible is a judgement, and one worth checking with your funder rather than with software.
Not a payroll system
Staff costs are usually the largest heading and they come from your payroll records. What is covered here is everything you buy.
The fourth is the one to keep in view when judging whether this is worth adopting. If staff are 70% of your budget, this addresses the other 30% — which is still the 30% that generates the documents and the queries.