Grant Tracker

Manage your full grant pipeline — funders, applications, deadlines, documents and reminders — in one place. Runs entirely inside your own CartonCrew with no external provider needed.

Who this is for: admins and fundraising staff in an org with the Grant Tracker extension enabled.

What’s here

Grant Tracker adds two separate items to the sidebar. They are not tabs of one page:

A button on each page links to the other: Funders from the pipeline, and ← Pipeline from the funders list.

A third screen belongs to this extension without appearing in the sidebar: Settings → Org Profile. Its contents feed the AI drafting described below.

The pipeline board

Grants sit in one of seven stages, in this order:

Prospect → Eligible → In Progress → Submitted → Under Review → Awarded → Declined

Drag a card to another column to move it; the new stage and the card’s position are both saved. You can also change the stage from the Stage dropdown inside the grant.

Three filters sit above the board:

• Assignee — defaults to All assignees.
• Funder — defaults to All funders.
• Min AI fit — hide anything scoring below the number you type.

Min AI fit filters on a score the AI produces, not one you enter. A grant you have never run a fit analysis on has no score, so a minimum above zero hides it. See AI Assist, below.

Adding a grant

1. Open Grants and click + Add grant. The dashed + Add grant button at the foot of the Prospect and Eligible columns does the same thing and starts the grant in that column.
2. The Add grant window asks for five things:
   • Grant title (the only required field)
   • Funder — pick from your funders, or leave it as — No funder —
   • Stage
   • Amount requested (USD)
   • Application deadline
3. Click Add grant.

Saving without a title is refused with “Title is required.”

The Add grant window deliberately asks for very little. The rest of a grant’s fields appear once it exists, on the Overview tab described next.

Working on a grant

Click a card to open the grant in a panel that slides in from the side. It is headed with the grant’s own title, and beneath that the funder and current stage. The panel has four tabs:

Delete (admins only) and a close ✕ sit at the top of the panel.

Overview

The five fields from the Add grant window, plus:

• Amount awarded (USD)
• Assigned to — a person in your org, or — Unassigned —
• Submission date and Decision date
• Report due and Report submitted
• Program officer and Program officer email
• Notes

Click Save changes to apply them.

Filling in Report submitted is what takes a grant off the dashboard’s Reports due · next 30 days list. Until it is set, the grant stays on that list however long ago you sent the report.

AI Assist

Two tools, both driven by what you have put in Settings → Org Profile:

Fit analysis. Paste the funder’s posted criteria or RFP text into Funder criteria / RFP text, then click Analyze fit. You get a score, a recommendation of Pursue, Proceed with Caution or Do Not Pursue, and — where the analysis found them — Strengths and Gaps / concerns. The score is what the board’s Min AI fit filter uses, and the card shows it as a Fit chip.

Asking for an analysis before pasting anything is refused with “Paste the funder criteria first.”

Narrative drafting. Choose a Section — Executive Summary, Statement of Need, Project Description, Evaluation Plan or Budget Narrative — and click Generate draft. Copy puts the result on your clipboard. The page says so itself, and it is worth repeating: “AI-generated draft. Review carefully before submission.”

Documents

Pick a Type for next upload — RFP, Draft narrative, Final application, Budget, Supporting material, Award letter, Report, Correspondence or Other — then click Upload file and choose the file. Each row then offers Download, and Delete for admins.

Accepted formats and size are shown next to the button: PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PNG, JPG · max 25MB. Both limits are enforced on the server as well as in the browser, so a rejected file is rejected for good reasons rather than as a display quirk.

Reminders

CartonCrew builds this schedule for you. Click Auto-configure to generate it from the dates already on the grant; the tab states the schedule plainly: “Reminders fire at ~8:00am Pacific on their date. Standard set: 30, 14, 7, and 1 day before.”

Reminders are generated for exactly two dates: the Application deadline and the Report due date. There is no reminder for a decision date. Each row shows Scheduled or Sent, and an unsent reminder can be deleted.

There is no way to write a reminder by hand — the tab has no create form, only Auto-configure. That is deliberate: whenever you save the Overview tab with a changed deadline, report date, stage or assignee, the reminder set is rebuilt from the new dates in the same operation. A hand-written reminder would be silently replaced, so the product does not offer one.

With no dates set, the tab says: “No reminders. Set an application deadline or report due date, then Auto-configure.”

Funders

Open Funders in the sidebar. Search filters the list by funder name. The table shows Name, Focus areas, Geography, Grant range, Cycle and Active grants — the last being a count CartonCrew maintains for you of that funder’s grants that have not been declined.

Adding a funder

1. Click + Add funder.
2. Fill in the Add funder form:
   • Funder name (the only required field)
   • Website and Application portal URL
   • Focus areas (comma-separated), Geography scope, Grant cycle
   • Typical grant min (USD) and Typical grant max (USD)
   • Primary contact, Contact email, Contact phone
   • Notes
3. Under Historical giving, click + Add year for each past year you want to record — a year, an amount, and an awarded checkbox. ✕ removes a row.
4. Click Add funder.

Saving without a name is refused with “Funder name is required.”

Clicking a funder opens a panel with its details, its Historical giving, and Grants from this funder. Edit reopens the form; Delete is available to admins.

Settings → Org Profile

This tab appears in Settings for orgs with Grant Tracker enabled, and only admins can change it. It is what the AI knows about you: “Used to assess grant fit and draft narratives. The more specific, the better the AI output.”

• Mission
• Programs (comma-separated)
• Geography served
• Annual budget range
• Impact to date (optional) — the outcomes and metrics a draft can cite

Filling this in properly is the single biggest influence on the quality of Analyze fit and Generate draft.

Exporting

Export on the pipeline (choose CSV or Excel) exports the grants your current filters leave visible. If you have the Cloud Drive extension connected, a second button saves the same export straight to your drive.

Where opportunities come from

Grants you add by hand are not the only source. With the Federal & State Grants extension enabled, a matched opportunity can be pushed into this pipeline — it arrives as a card in Prospect. See the Federal & State Grants page.

Last updated: 2026-09-15 · Applies to: CartonCrew v1.563+