Symplectic’s Awards Management module is designed to manage the full funding lifecycle, supporting the achievement of a more streamlined, transparent, and collaborative approach to research funding management, driving efficiencies and enhancing the overall success of your research endeavours.  This includes:

• communicating funding opportunities 

• facilitating proposal development 

• coordinating internal reviews and approvals

• managing project administration

• post-award deliverables and reporting, and

• project closure.

The Awards Management module allows institutions to publish upcoming funding opportunities and communicate them to their internal research community. This becomes an institutional hub for funding opportunities, combining information from funders with information about internal processes, and providing researchers with one place to go to find all the information they need. 

Researchers visit the Funding Opportunities page within Awards Management to browse opportunities and can use a range of relevant filters and facets to find specific opportunities of interest. 

Each opportunity includes a ‘share’ button allowing researchers and administrators to copy a URL which links directly to that opportunity in Elements so they can share it with colleagues across the organization. 

Funding opportunities can also be favourited, so they can be easily found again.

Proposal development functionality offers a range of configurable funding workflows to support collaborative proposal writing, review processes and procedural checks, and approvals. 

Researchers will be able to export any proposals created within Awards Management to use as the basis for the submission to the funder. Alternatively, proposals that are being submitted to the funder using the funder’s template can be attached to the proposal form within Awards Management.

Researchers will be able to develop funding proposals by:

• Confirming they meet the funder’s eligibility requirements

• Adding internal collaborators to the proposal 

• Capturing project costs

• Attaching documents, and

• Editing and resubmitting proposals in response to review feedback.  

The Awards Management module offers a significant set of configuration, monitoring and management tools to:

• Configure forms, review processes and compliance checks in line with local institutional requirements. This can include the facility to capture links out to institutional proposal support tools, and can support multi-stage application processes (e.g. Expression of Interest through to full Proposals).

• Create customised budget templates in line with institutional costing and pricing models/requirements. 

• Manage funding/proposal rounds including: 

  • Monitoring in-progress proposals, with embedded guidance for researchers as required

  • Managing review processes including reviewing submitted proposals and/or assigning submitted proposals to reviewers across the institution

  • Completing compliance checks and recording formal approvals

  • Generating reports and/or monitoring dashboards, and

  • Viewing audit logs of user actions and updates on proposals.

The Awards Management module includes functionality to support the contract review process for successful applications.  This includes capturing contract documentation, assigning internal reviewers, and tracking communications with the funder.  

The Awards Management module offers a bi-directional finance system integration. This integration is finance-system agnostic and is based on a file-transfer process in which CSV files are generated, transferred & ingested by each system.

The extract of data from Awards Management includes the facility to extract project, budget, and internal collaborator data from Elements, supporting projects and project budgets to be set up on your institution’s finance system, improving efficiency by removing delays and the need for re-keying of data.

The ingestion of data from income and expenditure details from Finance into Elements enables the PI and relevant colleagues to get an accurate high-level view of the current real-time state of project expenditure against budget.

Throughout each project’s lifespan, the Awards Management module supports tracking project deliverables (both financial and and non-financial). The system captures information about the completion of each deliverable, including identifying when invoices should be generated (if payments are milestone based).  

The system will also be able to track project variances including cost and no-cost extensions. Once approved, administrators will capture updated metadata in the system e.g. adjusting project dates, capturing updated budget etc. The information stored against the project record will update (so that the information available on-screen is the most up-to-date). However, the original PDF version of the proposal that was initially approved will still be available on the project record, and any changes to start/end date or any supplements added to the overall awarded amount are fully auditable. 

The system will also support the capture of administrative metadata, status information, and notes to allow the capture of information about the completion of tasks associated with a project variance. 

The Awards Management module's relationships functionality enables the creation of related projects (aka sub-grants) for specific funding scenarios, namely:

• Extensions

• Distributed budgets and/or sub-contracting (with associated budget transfer functionality)

• Additional internal contributions

• Additional external contributions

The management and tracking of project budgets and finances is a core feature of the Awards Management module, flowing through the entire workflow from the capture of a budget as part of the submitted proposal through to the final payment and financial closure of a funded project.  

When configuring a funding opportunity, administrators will specify the required budget format and define rules which determine how individual project budgets are entered e.g. which budget categories are used and how many line items can be created for each category. The system can support the use of different funding templates for different funding opportunities.  This configuration allows budgets to be captured on the proposal form in one or many budget categories across multiple years. 

Budget entries can be configured to be captured as a single amount per category or as multiple lines per category. In the case of multiple budget lines, these can be rolled up into single line items at certain points through the proposal/project lifecycle. The configurable budget templates will also provide fields for capturing the institution’s contribution to research (matched funding amounts), and overheads or contributions can be automatically calculated based on a percentage. This can be cumulative or fixed for each category over each year. 

The Awards Management module also supports the capture of additional metadata for each budget line item which can be used to provide context for reviewers, approvers, or aid reporting. Budget templates also support the ability to identify whether or not an award will be liable to sales tax and support the capture of multiple budget codes.  

Typically, principal investigators (PIs) enter details of their required budget while developing their proposal, though this can be done at a later stage if required. All budget information is captured within the system as structured reusable metadata and once the budget has been created, it is reused throughout the funding workflow, and metadata from the budget can be included in reports or dashboards. 

The system will guide PIs through the process of creating their budget as a part of developing their proposal. PIs will build up their budget line by line, capturing figures for each year of the project, and can add descriptions for each budget line; embedded guidance information helps ensure PIs can develop their budget accurately. Budgets can be developed iteratively, and the PI can save their progress and return to complete it at a later date.  

Once a PI has submitted their proposal for review, the proposal form and associated budget will be moved to a read-only state, preventing further edits by the PI until the review is complete. Reviewers with an appropriate role can view the budget associated with each proposal during their review process to analyse costs and to inform decisions. The budget can then be adjusted based on the reviewers’ feedback if necessary.  

During the award management workflow, each project’s budget will be automatically populated using the budget developed during the proposal stage. The budget can then be edited if required to represent any revisions or variances from the proposed budget to the awarded budget. The system will store multiple versions of the budget by capturing snapshots of budget details at key events in the proposal/project lifecycle. If for some reason a budget was not developed at the proposal stage, a new budget can be created as a part of the project set-up process. 

Administrators can also capture a range of metadata as a part of the budget and project set-up process, including capturing information about completed compliance checks, attaching associated documentation and recording any additional approvals necessary.  

As a proposal progresses through its various potential stages of development (such as in preparation, review, internal approval, submission to funder, and response from funder), all of these states can be recorded on the proposal record within Awards Management, enabling the proposal’s status to be viewed by all relevant users at all times.

Administrative users and managers are able to see all proposals in each state in order to easily monitor the overall pipeline of activity.

All relevant users can also see where in the workflow the proposal is, and with whom the current action lies, thereby providing transparency to researchers, giving them assurances that their proposal is progressing through internal steps.

The proposal forms in Awards Management are configurable by the institution in terms of the information requested from the researcher, based on the requirements for that particular funding opportunity and internal data requirements. The draft/completed proposal will be visible to all relevant users, along with the option to download.

The proposal form supports both the input of associated websites and the upload of documents (e.g. copies of the application developed on the funder’s portal, CVs, letters of support or other supporting information), in any file format (both with associated description). Any attached documentation or URLs will then be visible to all users with access to the proposal.

Proposal functionality in Awards Management also supports ‘journaling’, which will enable users to capture administrative comments on the proposal, visible to administrators via the management console.  

Researchers can find their proposals and Projects via their My Proposals and My Projects pages, which include a number of filtering options, enabling the user to find a specific proposal or project quickly and easily. Filters include:

• Status

• Funder

• The user’s role on the project (e.g. Principal investigator, Co-investigator)

• Title

• Internal close date

Grants Administrators using the Awards Management Admin Console have a powerful search tool allowing them to search for proposal and project records using a wide range of criteria. Administrators can then either click on search results to work directly on each record or create an export of the search results. 

Organisations that license the Awards Management module gain access to a number of stock reports on funding opportunities, proposals, reviews, projects, deliverables, change requests, etc. 

Access to content and functionality in Awards Management is restricted to specific Funding roles, ensuring only relevant colleagues have visibility of Funding data and activity.