Grant Management is a tool in Catalyzer for administering cross-hub grants. You create a grant, define its reporting schedule, add the organizations that receive it, review what they submit, and release payments. This article covers the grantor side, which lives in the Grant Management menu.

You might use Grant Management to:

• Run a funding round such as SBA TAP Round 3 across a group of awardee organizations
• Collect an invoice and an activity report from every awardee each quarter
• Review invoices with two independent reviewers before approving payment
• Release payment tranches and track how much of each award has been disbursed

If you are an awardee receiving a grant, see the Grant Management (for Awardees) article.

Before You Start

Grant Management is an optional tool. It appears in your left-hand navigation only when your hub has it switched on and your role is System Admin or Admin. Advisors and custom roles never see it, whatever permissions they hold.

Seeing the menu is only the first gate. By default, only System Admins can create and edit grants and awardees. Admins can view and review, but they won't see Settings, New Grant, Periods, + Add Awardee, or the controls for assigning reviewers.

Grant permissions don't appear in the Manage Roles matrix, so you can't adjust them from Settings.

💡 How do I invite an awardee? You don't. An awardee is another Catalyzer hub, and the organization that receives your grant works in its own hub, in a separate menu called Awardee Portal. Your support team registers the awardee's hub and connects it to yours. Once the hub is registered, it appears in Add Awardee, and the awardee's admins get the Awardee Portal menu in their own hub.

How Grant Management Works

Grant Management uses a small set of terms, and each one maps to a real step in running a grant:

• Grant: one funding award, with a name, funder, budget, and program type. Creating a grant also creates a matching Catalyzer Program.
  
  • Program type: one of four: TAP, CIP, SSBCI TA, or SSBCI SBOP.
• Program year and reporting periods: each grant has program years, and each program year has reporting periods (quarters, or reports for SSBCI TA).
• Awardee: one registered awardee hub on one grant. The same organization on two grants is two awardee records.
• Milestone: for each awardee and each period, one invoice (costs and documents) and one activity report (metrics derived from data). The screens call them Submissions, Invoices, and Reports.
• Review: staff review invoices. Reports close when the period's invoice is approved.
• Disbursement: a payment tranche to an awardee, released manually by staff.

A grant moves through these steps in order:

1. Support registers the awardee's hub.
2. You create the grant.
3. You add a program year and its reporting periods.
4. You add awardees to the grant.
5. Each awardee submits a report and an invoice for each period.
6. Your reviewers approve, return, or hold the invoice.
7. You release disbursements.
8. You track results on the Performance page.

Milestones are generated for you and never created by hand. Every reporting period you add automatically creates one invoice and one activity report for each awardee. Periods drive everything downstream, which is why the schedule is the most important part of setup.

The Grant Management menu has eight items: Dashboard, Awardees, Invoices/Reports, Disbursements, Grants, Performance, Uploads, and Settings. Settings appears only for users with edit rights on grants.

Setting Up Grant Settings

Open Settings to reach Grant Settings. It has three tabs: Hub Memberships, Communications, and Review Checklist.

Hub Memberships

Hub Memberships lists the hubs your hub can award to. This Hub (Admin / Grantor) shows your own hub, and Awardee Hubs lists each registered awardee with the date it was added.

The list is read-only. It has no add or remove control, because your support team maintains it. To add or remove an awardee hub, contact support. Until a hub is registered, the tab reads No awardee hubs registered yet.

Communications

Grantor notification recipients takes a comma-separated list of email addresses that receive milestone event emails. Leave it blank and Catalyzer falls back to the hub account owner. Click Save to apply it.

Below that, the email log records every outbound grant email. You can filter it by awardee ID and by date range, and each row opens the email that was sent. Automatic emails include submission notices, confirmations, approvals, returns, disbursement releases, deadline reminders at 30, 14, and 7 days, and overdue notices.

Review Checklist

A Review Checklist is the structured list your reviewers use when they review reports and invoices. Reviewers log findings against it, and it supplies the pre-written text they send back to awardees.

• No checklist lets reviewers decide without a structured findings list.
• Choosing a checklist template saves immediately.
• By programme lets you set a different template for each program type. A programme choice overrides the choice above it, and a single grant can override even that. Saving the first grant of a program type creates a checklist for it automatically, so these rows usually arrive pre-filled.
• Wording lets you edit the reasons in each template: a category, a short label, the text sent to the awardee, and which documents it applies to. Reasons are retired, never deleted.

A new template starts empty, so copy the wording you need into it. Edits to wording apply from that point forward, and anything already sent keeps the wording it was sent with.

While No checklist is selected, the per-programme choices do nothing.

The checklist matters beyond wording. Adopting one switches on the structured findings list on the review page, and it enables the routing choices Return to awardee now and Back to the other reviewer. Without a checklist, those options don't exist.

Creating a Grant

Open Grants from the menu. The page lists each grant with its Name, Funder, Program, Budget, and Status, and offers Export CSV, Export XLSX, and New Grant.

1. Click New Grant.
2. Enter the Grant Name, Funder Name, and Program Type. All three are required.
3. Enter the Total Budget ($) and Max Award ($) if you'd like.
4. Enter the App Open Date, App Close Date, and Award Date. All three are required.
5. Choose a Status: Draft, Open, Closed, or Archived. New grants start as Draft.
6. Add a Description if you'd like.
7. Fill in the Report Due-Date Rules (see below).
8. Click Create Grant.

The App Open and App Close dates are plain fields. Grant Management doesn't collect applications.

Report Due-Date Rules auto-populate milestone due dates when milestones are generated. They take three values: Quarterly: days after period end, Annual: due month (1–12), and Annual: due day (1–31). Changing the rules later updates the due dates of pending milestones only. Periods with their own due date keep it, and anything already submitted keeps its date.

The Treasury Goals button stays disabled until the grant is saved. It opens grant-year targets for grantor-only metrics, which roll up every awardee's reporting and so aren't set per awardee.

Creating a grant also creates a Catalyzer Program with the same name. The Program column shows the type badge and a chip linking to that program's goals. There is no program picker, so you don't choose one.

Only grants with the status Open appear when you add an awardee, so set a grant to Open before you add awardees to it.

Grants can't be deleted. To retire one, set its status to Archived, which also archives its linked program.

Defining the Reporting Schedule

From the Grants table, click Periods on a grant to open Program Years & Reporting Periods. Both Periods and the pencil for editing a grant appear only for users with edit rights.

Add a Program Year

1. Enter the Start Month, Start Year, End Month, and End Year. The Program Type is locked to the grant's type.
2. Click Add Year.

A program year is identified by its end year, so two years ending in the same year collide. Catalyzer shows A {TYPE} program year ending in {YYYY} already exists for this grant. A year also can't end before it starts.

Add Reporting Periods

1. Click a program year in the list.
2. Click Add Reporting Period.
3. Enter a Name.
4. Choose the Quarter, or the Report number for SSBCI TA grants. Numbers already in use disappear from the list, and the field reads All in use when none are left.
5. Enter the Start Date and End Date.
6. Set a Due Date, or leave it blank to apply the grant's due-date rule. The table shows Grant rule for these.
7. Set Submission Accepted Until if you want a different cutoff. It defaults to the period end date plus 30 days.
8. Save the period.

The periods table shows Name, Cadence, Start, End, Due, Accepted Until, Status, and Actions.

💡 Note: Saving a reporting period creates work for every awardee immediately. Each awardee on the grant gets a pending invoice and a pending report for that period, and an awardee added later gets milestones for every existing period. A period's dates lock once an awardee submits against it, so set dates carefully.

Some edits lock as work begins:

• After an awardee submits against a period, its start and end dates are fixed. The name, Due Date, and Accepted Until remain editable.
• Delete disappears as soon as an awardee has started work on a period, and a draft or an upload counts as work.
• A program year can't be deleted once any of its periods has awardee work, or once goals are set for it.

Per-Awardee Schedules

Some awardees report on their own cadence. On a program year row, click Manage schedules to open Awardee Schedules.

1. Select the awardees.
2. Choose a Cadence: Monthly, Quarterly, or Annual.
3. Enter the First period start date.
4. Choose Until an end date or Number of periods, and enter it.
5. Choose the Due date rule: Days after period end or Day of the following month.
6. Click Preview periods. Nothing is saved yet.
7. Click Apply schedule to N awardees.

Applying a schedule replaces the selected awardees' pending grant-wide invoice and report milestones for that year. Submitted milestones are kept, and any period that overlaps a kept submission is skipped. A schedule can't be removed once the awardee has submitted against it.

Adding Awardees

Open Awardees from the menu. Program tabs run across the top (All, TAP, CIP, SSBCI TA, SSBCI SBOP), with a status filter and buttons for Export CSV, Export XLSX, Import Goals, Set Goals, and + Add Awardee. The table shows Organization, Grant Name, Program, Award, Disbursed, and Status.

1. Click + Add Awardee.
2. Choose the Awardee Hub. The list contains only hubs on your Hub Memberships list.
3. Choose the Grant Program. The list contains only Open grants.
4. Enter the Grant Agreement Number if you have one, and the Fiscal Authority, which is who the invoice is made out to.
5. Leave Remittance address same as Hub Settings ticked, or untick it to enter a different address. A 5-digit ZIP is required.
6. Enter the Award Amount ($) and the Award Date.
7. Click Add Awardee. The button stays disabled until the hub, the grant, and an amount above zero are set.

Once an award exists, the hub and grant are locked, because its submissions and disbursements belong to them. The fiscal authority, agreement number, remittance address, amount, and date stay editable. These details print on the invoice, which is why they're worth filling in when you add the awardee.

Nothing blocks you from adding the same hub to the same grant twice, so check the list before you add.

The Awardee Record

Click an awardee to open its record. It has six tabs:

• Overview: cards for Award Amount, Disbursed (as tranches), Submissions, and Engagements, plus the Federal Reporting toggle, Include in SUS / SBA federal reporting. This toggle feeds the SBA rollup filter on the Performance page.
• Submissions: this awardee's invoices and reports, in the same table as the queue.
• Disbursements: the payment tranches for this award. This is the only place to add one.
• Engagements: a log of contact with the awardee. Click Log Engagement and choose a type (Site Visit, Call, Technical Assistance, Email, Meeting, or Webinar), then enter a Title, date, duration, team names, notes, and action items. Engagements can't be edited or deleted after you log them.
• Goals: Goals vs. Actuals for a program year, showing target, actual, and progress for each metric. Use Save targets to save, or Import Goals to upload an Excel template (.xlsx, .xls, or .xlsm, up to 9 MB). Blank or zero targets become N/A after a confirmation.
• Activity: the audit trail.

Goals matter for a practical reason. Awardees' activity reports show only metrics that have a goal, so set goals before awardees report. To set goals for many awardees at once, use Set Goals on the Awardees page, which opens a grid for one program year, or Import Goals with a filled template.

Reviewing Submissions

The Invoices/Reports Queue

Open Invoices/Reports to see everything awardees have submitted. Type tabs read All types, Invoices, and Reports. Status tabs read All, Needs review, Approved, Returned, On Hold, Overdue, and Rejected, and the page opens on Needs review. All leaves out items that are merely pending, but it does include Overdue ones, which the awardee hasn't submitted.

Filters cover year, grant, period, and awardee, and a bookmark icon saves your filters. The table shows the awardee, submission, program year, grant name, program type, funder, type,

amount, submitted date, and status. On invoices, Payment Due appears as a countdown badge. On the Needs review tab, a Reviewers column shows who is assigned.

There are no bulk actions, so you review each item individually. The Dashboard shows the same work in summary: KPI cards, a donut chart of invoice and report status, and a Pending Reviews list with tabs With Me, Unassigned, and With Others. System Admins also see All Assigned.

The Review Page

Click an item to open Review Submission. The header card shows the awardee, grant, amount, period, and dates. For invoices, it also shows:

• A stepper reading Submitted, In Review, Verified
• A Cost Breakdown
• Supporting Documents
• A Report button that opens the paired activity report. It's red and disabled, with The Report has not been Submitted Yet, when there isn't one.

The toolbar offers Download all documents, Print, and New Invoice, and tabs, Details and Activity. Screens use "Approved" and "Verified" for the same state, so match whichever word you see.

💡 Where is the approve button on a report? Reports are view-only. You decide on the invoice, and the activity report closes when the period's invoice is approved. A report page has no decision controls by design.

Reviewing With Two Reviewers

By default, each invoice needs two independent reviewers. Only users with edit rights on grants can assign them. Everyone else sees Awaiting reviewer assignment by a grants admin.

1. Open the invoice's review page and click Assign Reviewers.
2. Choose a person for Reviewer 1 and another for Reviewer 2. They must be different people, and candidates are the System Admins and Admins in your hub.
3. Each reviewer opens the invoice and chooses Approved, Declined, or Hold.
4. Each reviewer enters a written reason. Catalyzer requires one for every choice, approvals included.

Reviewers work in isolation. Decisions stay private until all reviewers have submitted, and other reviewers show as Not disclosed in the history until the review is final.

The outcome follows a fixed rule:

• Both approve: the invoice is Approved.
• Both decline: the invoice is returned to the awardee. The awardee sees reviewer comments as "Reviewer 1" and "Reviewer 2", never by name.
• They disagree: the invoice shows Review Conflict. Someone with edit rights picks a third person and clicks Escalate to Tie-breaker. The tie-breaker chooses Approved or Declined and settles it.

Hold is for issues on the activity report or a missing Success Story only. Invoice amounts can't be edited on hold. The awardee fixes the report and resubmits it, or adds a missing Success Story to the invoice and resubmits that. Hold is unavailable when the invoice has findings of its own, and those invoices have to be returned. On hold, the paired report goes back to the awardee, and the invoice returns to review automatically when they resubmit.

When you decline or hold with a Review Checklist adopted, a dialog asks Where should this invoice go? You can choose Return to awardee now (or Put On Hold now), or Wait for the other reviewer, or Back to the other reviewer if they've already decided. If the other reviewer has already approved, your decline goes to a tie-breaker and is recorded.

If a grant is set to one required reviewer, the review page shows a single Admin Decision instead, with Verify or Return for Revision and a required note to the awardee.

Logging Findings

When a Review Checklist is adopted, the review page shows {Program} Review Checklist, where you log what needs fixing. Each issue is sent to the awardee if the invoice is returned.

1. Choose a Document: Narrative, Metrics, Invoice, Backup Documentation, Business Assistance Profile, Success Story, or Other.
2. Choose a Section.
3. Pick a Common issue from the templates if one fits.
4. Type the issue text, which is exactly what the awardee sees.

Reviewer Notes are tagged Not shared with the awardee. Communication History logs everything sent to and from the awardee.

When an awardee resubmits, findings from the previous round carry forward. Each one must be marked Fixed or Not Fixed, and Approved stays disabled until every carried finding is marked. Catalyzer also refuses approval while any finding is Not Fixed.

Reopening an Approved Invoice

Approved items show Reopen for Amendment. Reopening returns the item to returned status, the awardee must resubmit, and the review cycle restarts. Enter a Reason for amendment, which is stored in the audit log and visible to the awardee.

Disbursements

Open Disbursements to see payment tranches across all awardees. Tiles show Total Released, Pending Release, and Total Tranches. Filter pills read All, Pending, and Released, and you can export to CSV or XLSX.

In the table, the Grant column shows the program-type chip, and the grant's name is in Grant Name.

Adding a Tranche

Tranches are added only from the awardee record.

1. Open the awardee and select the Disbursements tab.
2. Click + Add Disbursement.
3. Enter the Amount and, if you'd like, a Scheduled Date. Tick Paid in Advance if it applies.
4. Save. Catalyzer assigns the tranche number automatically, and the new tranche is pending.

Releasing a Tranche

Release is a manual step. Approving an invoice doesn't release payment by itself.

1. Click Release → on a pending tranche, from either the Disbursements page or the awardee record.
2. Check the Amount, which is pre-filled. Changing it shows Changed from $X. The edit is recorded in the audit log.
3. Set the Release date. It defaults to today, and you can pick an earlier date if the payment went out earlier.
4. Click Release $X.XX. The awardee is notified.

Only pending tranches can be released.

The pencil opens Edit Disbursement, and the clock icon shows a tranche's audit log. Editing a released tranche is allowed but requires a Reason for changing a released disbursement. On a pending tranche, entering a release date sends you to the release step, which notifies the awardee.

A few things don't exist: there is no cap against the award amount, no requirement for an approved invoice before release, no way to delete or un-release a tranche, and no way to cancel one

Printing Invoices and Viewing Documents

From an invoice's review page, Print opens the original invoice layout and New Invoice opens the Catalyzer layout. The browser's print dialog opens automatically, and a toolbar button switches layouts next to Print / Save PDF. The sheet shows the invoice number, date, grant agreement number, center name, report period, fiscal authority, remittance address, expenditure period, and a charges table ending in Total Invoice Amount.

There is no grantor document library page. Open documents from the review page, the report window, or the print view. A click opens a side preview with Download and Open in new tab, or a full page with Download original. Previews render PDFs, images, spreadsheets and CSV files as tables, Word documents, and text. Files that are too large to preview offer a Download button instead.

Uploads and Performance

Uploads

Upload History lists every awardee data file uploaded through the import pipeline: who uploaded it, when, and whether it validated cleanly. Search by client, grant, or file name, filter by program, and set a date range that defaults to Last Completed Quarter. Each file shows a status of Staged or Computed, along with row and error counts. The page is read-only.

Performance

The Performance page shows results from top to bottom:

1. Approved data only: a switch that counts only quarters whose invoice has been approved. Turn it off to count every submitted report.
2. Network Total: every awardee's reported results for the grant year, added up.
3. Treasury Performance Metrics: grantor-only. Awardees don't see these. Display modes are Tabular, Cards, Pie, Bar, and Trend.
4. Date-range chips: these scope only the budget and disbursement charts below them. The default is Last 30 days.
5. Budget and disbursement charts: Grants, Total Budget, Total Disbursed, and Deployment %, with Budget vs. Disbursed by Grant and Disbursements by Status.
6. Awardee Spenddown: award, invoiced, and disbursed amounts for each awardee, cumulative to date and unaffected by the date range.
7. SBA / SUS Program Rollup: choose a grant and program year, optionally limit it to SUS / SBA-flagged awardees only, and export to CSV or XLSX.

Bringing It Together

Grant Management follows a grant from its first program year to its last disbursement in one place. The reporting schedule you set at the start decides the work every awardee owes, and the review record you build along the way is the audit trail behind every payment.