Our grant manager just left. What do we do in the first week?
Find every active award, list every due date in the next 90 days, name one interim owner for each, and confirm what was already submitted. That sequence covers the real risk, which is a report that falls due while nobody knows it exists.
The method
- Get access before anything else. Shared drive, the departed person's email (forwarded or delegated, according to your policy), and the shared inbox the funders write to. Do not rely on their personal logins. Where a funder portal is tied to the person, ask the funder to add a current staff member as a user.
- List every active award. Check the shared drive, the finance system's grant codes, board reports and recent emails from funders. One line each: funder, award number, amount, start and end dates, contact at the funder.
- Find the agreement for each one. Without the signed agreement you cannot know what is due. If it is missing, ask the funder for a copy. Do not work from memory or from an old summary.
- Write down every due date for the next 90 days. Read each agreement for reports, deliverables, site visits and closeout dates. The award letter method walks through it, and the free reporting schedule calculator turns a rule such as quarterly into dates.
- Check what is already overdue. Compare the dates with what was actually submitted. Look for submission confirmations in the files and the funder's emails. Anything late goes first, and what to do in the first hour applies.
- Name one interim owner for each deliverable. One accountable person per report, and a backup. Put the names in a table the whole team can see. Splitting the work is fine, but there is still only one owner.
- Brief the funder contacts where the agreement names the person who left. A short note: who the new contact is, and that nothing has changed about the work. Keep it factual and do not speculate about why the person left.
- Collect the evidence trail for each open deliverable. Where is the data, the sign-in sheets, the receipts and the last report as submitted? If you do not know, note it as a gap and ask the program staff.
- Ask the people around the grants what was promised verbally. Program staff and the executive director often know of a funder's informal request or an extension discussed on a call. Write each down with the date and who said it, and confirm with the funder in writing.
- Set a weekly 20 minute review for the next two months. Look at the next 30 days of dates and any change of owner. Then fold it into your regular deadline tracking.
Your award agreement and your funder's instructions are the authority on every date and requirement. This page is a working method, not legal, audit or compliance advice.
The first 48 hours, short version
- Access to files, email and the funder inbox.
- A list of every active award and where its agreement is.
- Anything due or overdue in the next 14 days, with a named person on it.
Everything else can wait until the following days. A missed report is the expensive error, and it is the one that a first-48-hours list prevents.
A worked example (made-up)
A five-person nonprofit loses its development manager on a Friday. On Monday the executive director finds four awards in the shared drive and a fifth only through a funder's email. Reading the agreements turns up a quarterly report due in 9 days, an annual report in 40 and a site visit in 55. The program director takes the quarterly report, the bookkeeper takes the financial portion, and the executive director calls the funder's contact about the site visit. Nothing is late, and all of it came from reading the agreements rather than trusting a hand-off note that did not exist.
What not to do
- Do not assume the agreements are in the drive. Find them or ask the funder.
- Do not give the whole pile to one person with no dates. Dates and owners come first.
- Do not log in as the departed person. Ask funders to add a current user.
- Do not leave it to a future handoff note. Keep a register that survives the next departure. Prevention is in who should own each grant deliverable.
The faster path, and what it does not do
If you have the award letters, GrantClose gets you to the same list faster. Upload a letter (a PDF with a text layer, or a DOCX) and it suggests the reports and dates it finds, with the source sentence beside each one. Nothing becomes a deliverable until you confirm it. Each deliverable then gets one owner who must be a member of your organisation, reminders at 30, 14, 7 and 1 days before and on the due date, and weekly overdue reminders that copy your admins. The owner can be changed on any deliverable, and a weekly digest to admins lists what is due and overdue.
- It does not find your agreements, recover logins or know what the former manager promised verbally.
- A scanned letter with no text layer cannot be read automatically (there is no OCR); it opens manual entry instead.
- Suggested dates are suggestions. Check each against the agreement before you confirm it.
- It never contacts a funder and never submits a report.
GrantClose turns award letters into dated deliverables with one owner each, so a departure does not hide a deadline. GrantClose never submits anything to a funder, writes your reports or gives legal, audit or compliance advice. Extracted dates are suggestions you confirm. Free for 1 active award. Create a free account
Questions
What should I do first when the grant manager quits?
Get access to files and the funder inbox, list every active award with its agreement, and list everything due or overdue in the next two weeks with a named person on each.
How do I find all our grants if there is no list?
Check the shared drive, the finance system's grant codes, board reports and funder emails. If you find one only from an email, ask that funder for a list of the awards it holds with you.
Should I tell the funder our grant manager left?
If the agreement names that person as a contact, yes. A short factual note with the new contact is enough, and it is easier to send it before a report is due than after.
What if the agreement is missing?
Ask the funder for a copy. Do not work from memory or a summary, because the dates and rules are in the agreement.
Who should own the grants while we hire?
Name one interim owner per deliverable, usually whoever runs the related program or keeps the books, and a backup. Do not give all of them to one person without dates.
Sources
No regulation was read for this page. It is a working method, and the agreement for each award is the authority on what is due.