Choosing Grant Management Software for Local Government

Dean Murphy Growth Marketing Specialist, Submit.com

Councils that end up with the wrong system rarely picked the wrong features. More often, the vendor ran the evaluation: a polished demo of a generic scheme, a feature grid everyone ticked, and a decision made before anyone asked to see the audit trail on a real application.

This guide is for the grants officer or programme manager who has to get a buying committee to yes. You will find the questions each committee member asks, a way to write requirements you can defend, a scoring template, a demo script, advice on piloting, and what to ask a council that has already made the move. Irish and UK local authorities are covered side by side, because their duties differ more than most buyer guides admit.

What does grant management software need to do for a council?

Grant management software for local government is a system that runs a council’s funding schemes in one place, from the first application to the final audit. That covers intake, eligibility checks, assessment and scoring, award decisions, payments and drawdowns, monitoring returns and reporting.

Check one thing early. Much of what ranks for “government grant software” is built for organisations trying to win grants, often US bodies chasing federal funding. A council community grants team sits on the other side of the table: you design schemes, assess applicants and account for money you give out. If a demo opens with a grant search tool, you are talking to the wrong kind of vendor.

Submit.com’s grant management software is built for the grantmaker side, which is the side this guide assumes you are on.

What usually pushes a grants team to change systems?

Teams rarely switch because a new tool looks nicer. Something breaks first.

Usually it is one of four things. Internal audit asks for the scoring history on a contested award and nobody can produce it without a week of forwarding emails. A new scheme lands, often with a national department’s money and a tight opening date, and the spreadsheet cannot cope. The officer who built the process moves on and takes the knowledge with them. Or a digital mandate arrives from the top that rules out another year of PDF forms.

The before picture at Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council will sound familiar to many teams. Community grant forms were downloaded from the council website, emailed to grant managers and scored in Excel, and the email chains between staff grew until the whole process was, in the council’s words, very labour intensive.

Be honest about which trigger you have, because it sets your must-haves. An audit finding puts the audit trail at the top of the list. A new national scheme makes configuration speed the priority. A departure means you need a system your team can run without one resident expert.

Who signs off, and what will each of them ask?

The programme lead usually champions the purchase, but six or seven people can stop it. Bring them in before the first demo, not after you have fallen for one.

• Grants programme lead: Can my team build a new scheme, and change it mid-round, without raising a ticket with IT or the vendor?
• ICT: How will staff sign in, and who configures permissions across departments? Cork City Council let ICT lead its rollout centrally so every department got the same governance.
• Information security: Which certifications does the supplier hold, and can we see the evidence rather than a logo?
• Data protection officer: Where is applicant data held, how long is it kept, and how is it deleted? Will the supplier support our Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)?
• Procurement: Which compliant route can we buy through, and what contract length does it allow?
• Finance: Can we see what was awarded, what was paid and what is left on each grant, without keeping a second spreadsheet?
• Head of service: Will this stand up in front of councillors, auditors and an FOI request?

Most of these questions have documentary answers: certificates, a SOC 2 report, a data processing agreement, an accessibility statement. Ask for them in writing. Our compliance checks for council grant software go through each one in more depth.

How do you write requirements that are not just a wish list?

A requirement list copied from a vendor brochure tells you nothing, because every vendor ticks it. Start instead with one scheme you run today, ideally the busiest. Write down every step from the day it opens to the last monitoring return, and note where the work piles up: chasing missing documents, merging reviewer scores, answering applicant calls, reconciling payments.

Then sort what you need into must, should and could. A must should trace back to either a legal or funder duty, or a pain you can put a number on. Everything else is a should at best.

The duties differ between the two jurisdictions, so treat them separately.

Duties UK councils should build in

• Transparency: Councils in England must publish details of all grants to voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations every year (Source: GOV.UK, Local Government Transparency Code 2015). Your system should hold beneficiary, purpose, amount, date and awarding department as structured fields you can export, not buried in free text.
• Subsidy control: Every subsidy scheme goes on the UK subsidy database, and individual awards under a published scheme follow once they exceed £100,000 (Source: legislation.gov.uk, Explanatory Memorandum to the Subsidy Control (Subsidy Database Information Requirements) Regulations 2022). That means tracking what each recipient has received over time, not just what each application asked for.
• Accessibility: Public sector websites and apps must meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA and publish an accessibility statement (Source: GOV.UK, Understanding accessibility requirements for public sector bodies). The Government Digital Service has said this includes services run on third-party tools (Source: GOV.UK Accessibility blog), so your applicant portal is in scope even though a supplier hosts it.
• Data protection: Expect your data protection officer to ask for a DPIA on any form that collects sensitive personal data, along with clear retention and deletion rules. Cork City Council completed a DPIA covering exactly those forms when it went digital.

For how these duties turn into specific features, see the grant software features councils need for reporting.

Duties Irish local authorities should build in

• Exchequer grants: Circular 13/2014 covers grant funding from public money whether it is paid directly by a department or through an intermediary body, and its default position is that grants are paid on the basis of vouched expenditure (Source: gov.ie, Circular 13/2014). Many council-run schemes are funded this way, so you need claims with receipts attached and drawdowns tracked against each award.
• Accessibility: Irish public bodies must meet S.I. 358/2020, which points to the EN 301 549 standard, broadly equivalent to WCAG 2.1 (Source: National Disability Authority). Ask each vendor for its accessibility statement for applicant forms.
• Irish language: Forms need to work in Irish as well as English. Kildare County Council converts full application forms to Gaeilge to meet its statutory Irish language requirements, with no technical staff involved.
• Data protection: GDPR applies, with the Data Protection Commission as regulator. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown set up its system so every applicant agrees to the council’s privacy statement and data is deleted under council policy.

How should a council score vendors fairly?

Agree the weights before anyone sees a demo. Once people have a favourite, weights have a way of drifting towards it.

Each committee member should score the criteria they own: security scores security, finance scores post-award. And everyone scores what the vendor showed on your scheme, not what the sales deck promised.

Treat these weights as a starting point, not a standard. A council recovering from an audit finding might push the audit trail higher, while one launching three schemes next quarter might weight configuration more. Price is usually scored separately under your procurement rules.

What should you ask to see in a demo?

Send the vendor one of your real schemes a week before the demo: the form, the eligibility rules, the scoring criteria and how your panel works. Then ask them to do the following live, in this order.

1. Add a question and a branch to your form while you watch, and let your own officer make the next change.
2. Set up an external assessor who can see only the applications allocated to them.
3. Show an assessor declaring a conflict of interest, and what happens to that application next.
4. Score a test application against your weighted criteria and show the calculated total.
5. Open the audit trail for that application: who did what, and when.
6. Record an award, a part payment and the remaining balance.
7. Switch the applicant form into English, Irish, Welsh, French, German, Spanish, Italian or Polish without losing the answers already entered.
8. Export the fields you would publish under your transparency duties.

If the answer to more than one or two of these is “we will follow up on that”, you have learned something. So has the rest of your committee.

Why run a pilot before a full rollout?

A pilot turns a decision into evidence. It also gives the sceptics on your committee something to point to other than your enthusiasm.

Cork City Council started with parking permits: high volume, resident facing, and a process both staff and the public wanted online. Within the first few months, 80 per cent of permit applications arrived digitally. ICT then led the rollout across departments, and the council now runs more than 100 forms, including arts, sports and community grants.

For a grants team, the equivalent is the scheme with the most applicants and the most phone calls. Pilots needn’t be slow, either. Developing Healthy Communities in Northern Ireland went live in eight weeks, with a programme manager who has no coding background configuring the forms herself.

Decide what success looks like before you start. Useful measures include the share of applications submitted online, staff hours spent chasing documents compared with the last round, reviewer turnaround, the number of applicant support calls, and whether internal audit accepts the audit trail export without follow-up questions.

What should you ask a reference council?

Ask the vendor for a council with schemes like yours, and speak to the grants officer who uses the system every week, not only the ICT lead who bought it.

• What did you migrate, and what did you deliberately leave behind?
• Who sets up a new scheme now, and how long does it take?
• What happened the first time internal audit asked for evidence?
• How did applicants cope in the first round?
• What did support look like three months after go-live?
• What would you do differently?

The answers can surprise you. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown’s team worried that community groups used to paper forms would struggle online. Application numbers went up instead, and feedback from applicants was overwhelmingly positive. That is the kind of detail you only get from a reference.

How do UK and Irish procurement routes differ?

UK councils often buy through G-Cloud 14, which allows a direct award once you have followed the buyer guide process (Source: Government Commercial Agency, formerly Crown Commercial Service). Call-off contracts can run for up to 36 months, with an optional 12-month extension (Source: Find a Tender, G-Cloud 14 contract award notice).

Irish local authorities advertise on eTenders, the national tendering platform managed by the Office of Government Procurement, which also sources common goods and services with sector partners including local government (Source: gov.ie, Office of Government Procurement).

Thresholds and framework versions change, so confirm the current rules with your procurement team. We cover the mechanics in where councils buy grant management software and in our guide to G-Cloud direct award.

Where Submit.com fits

Submit.com is a grant, awards and scholarship submission management platform based in Cork, used by councils in Ireland and the UK. It is listed on the UK Government’s G-Cloud framework, holds Cyber Essentials and SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 certification, and is GDPR compliant. Full detail is on the security and compliance page.

Against the scoring matrix above, these are the things worth testing in a Submit.com demo:

• Permissions across departments: Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown runs community grants for eight departments with 22 admin users, each seeing only what their role needs.
• An audit trail on every action: Scores, tags, comments and messages are logged with who made the change, what changed and when.
• Grant tracking: Amounts awarded, drawn down and remaining, across your whole portfolio.
• Panel controls: External reviewers with limited access, weighted scoring, and anonymised review where you need it.
• Language support: Multilingual forms in Irish, Welsh, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and English.

Some capabilities, including single sign-on and user activity audit logs, depend on your plan, so check the pricing page against your requirement list. You can see how the platform supports councils on our grant management software for government and local authorities page.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take a council to implement grant management software?

It depends on how many schemes you move and how complex the workflows are. Developing Healthy Communities went from decision to live in eight weeks with one programme. A rollout across several departments takes longer, which is why most councils start with a single pilot scheme.

Can one platform run several grant schemes at once?

Yes. Look for a system where each scheme has its own form, eligibility rules, review stages and scoring, while permissions and reporting work across all of them. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council runs community grants for eight departments on Submit.com, each with its own grant manager.

What should an audit trail record?

Every score, comment, tag, status change, message and decision, with who made it and when. It should be exportable, so you can hand evidence to internal audit, a scrutiny committee or an FOI officer without rebuilding the story from old emails.

Does grant management software support Irish or Welsh language forms?

Some platforms do. Submit.com’s multilingual forms support Irish, Welsh, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish and English, and applicants can switch language inside a form without losing their progress. Kildare County Council uses this to meet its statutory Irish language requirements.

How do councils buy grant management software?

In the UK, many councils use the G-Cloud framework, which allows a direct award once the buyer guide process has been followed. In Ireland, public bodies advertise tenders on eTenders, run by the Office of Government Procurement. Confirm current thresholds with your own procurement team.