GrantBridge

Scope. GrantBridge is a Back Road Creative product: a grant-consulting practice — the business plan, the operating procedures and a working application — packaged as one thing. The source is not public and there is nothing here to install. This page is what the system does and who it is for. Asking about access is a conversation; the About page is where to start one.

Both sides of the same grant

A grant has two parties and, usually, two advisors who never speak. One designs the program, writes the solicitation and runs the review. The other writes the proposal and files the reports. The handoffs between them — proposal to award, award to reporting, reporting to closeout — are where a dropped ball costs money or turns into an audit finding, and they are exactly the moments neither advisor owns.

GrantBridge is built as one practice serving both sides on one lifecycle. Seven stages — Pre-Award, Application/Review, Award, Implementation, Monitoring & Reporting, Closeout and Post-Closeout — govern every engagement, funder-side and recipient-side alike, and every stage carries services on both sides. A handoff becomes a stage transition inside one system rather than a phone call between two firms that may not happen.

What the package holds

Four things, written against each other rather than separately.

• The business. A plan built on the dual-sided model, with the operating model, the growth roadmap, and the conflict-of-interest policy that model requires: never both sides of the same program in the same funding cycle, and every engagement conflict-screened before it is accepted.
• The procedures. An operations manual and step-by-step SOPs — onboarding, the funder-side and recipient-side lifecycle walks, reporting and deliverables, document management, quality assurance, closeout. Each step names the system screen or form it touches, and each SOP was executed against the running application rather than written from imagination.
• The system. A working web application that is the practice’s system of record, so nothing about a live grant exists only in an inbox or a spreadsheet.
• One vocabulary. A glossary is the single source of truth for stage names, role names, entity names and system-surface names. Every other document references it and none redefines it, so two documents cannot drift into calling the same stage different things.

Fees follow from a published rate card — fixed-fee, retainer or hourly, and never a contingency or percentage-of-award arrangement on either side, which is what keeps the advice separable from the outcome.

The system of record

Intake forms open a client and a grant. The grant then moves one validated step at a time, each transition gated on that stage’s exit condition and written to an append-only audit log. Recording an award generates that grant’s reporting obligations on the spot, so the compliance calendar exists before anyone has to remember to build one. Tasks and milestones, documents, drawdown requests, closeout checklists and exportable reports all hang off the same grant record. Each client gets a portal login scoped to its own records, which is what removes the status call from the relationship.

It runs entirely on the machine you put it on. The server binds the loopback address only, the database and uploaded documents are local files, and there are no cloud services, no external APIs and no telemetry. Backing it up is copying a directory.

Who it is for

Someone launching or evaluating a grant-lifecycle consulting practice — one firm serving funders (foundations, government agencies, corporate giving programs) and recipients (nonprofits, municipalities, universities, tribal organizations, small businesses) without either side having to wonder whose interest is being served that week. The conflict rules and the rate card are load-bearing for that, not decoration.

It also carries a compliance framework built on the federal Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200) and foundation and state funding principles, labelled throughout as guidance rather than legal advice. The point of writing it down is that a recipient-side deadline and a funder-side monitoring duty are then read off the same reference instead of two.

Where it stands

The package is built and the application runs; its documents, procedures and screens were checked against each other and against the running system rather than signed off on inspection. What it has not done is reach real use — version control here holds no release to date one from, which is why the card on the work ledger reads in development rather than carrying a month.

Nothing on this page is an announcement. It describes a system that exists today, and the sibling product that grew out of its design — GrantPath, for the discovery-to-award end of the same work — describes the other half. If either is interesting, the About page is the way to reach me.