Hi! We're deepening our grantmaking operations & our integration with our financial system, and at the point where we want to add a grantee-facing unique identifier (a grant number) to our award letters. Our grantees can receive upwards of 10 grants a year from us, so our primary goal is to help them reconcile specific payments to specific awards.
I'm comfortable creating a new Auto Number field, but also considering using a formula in a Flow to use a different type of alphanumeric code as the identifier.
I'm curious to hear how other grantmakers have tackled this.
- Do you love an auto-number, or have you created your own coding system?
- Are there headaches your org went through that you wish you could have avoided?
- Particularly interested in nuances like if amendments use the same grant number as the initial grant, or if your identifiers are grant level (Funding Request) or Disbursement level, for multi-Disbursement grants.
Oooo, grant numbers. My response is a bit more policy-based, so if you don't have a policy around this, then you can totally just make it up!
I've worked with orgs that have a very specific naming convention for grant numbers. Maybe it's a specific portfolio code and then a string of sequential numbers; or maybe it's just the organization's abbreviations and then a string. But emphasis on the "sequential" part.
When you shouldn't use auto-numbering: because they track very specific grants vs. applications, they won't use the auto-numbering because they might get 100 applications, and only 10 grants, but those 10 grants must be in immediate sequential order, so the autonumbering would cause confusion (e.g. 0001 = grant #1; 0002 to 0050 = applications but not grants; 0051 = grant #2 feels very disjointed to them).
Likewise - it sounds like you are using outbound funds - if so, every record already has an auto-number for the NAME, so you could just start using the numbers in the record name as the unique grant number, and then build a formula to distinguish by program if you need (like what Steve said - e.g. '{{somePrefix}}-'& right(name,4) ). That way you can start with what you have and run a pilot with your internal team at least, and see if they like it, or even a group of very well-known grantees and see if that works for them, or if they need something more consistent. Or if you don't care about the prefix, simply use the record name as the grant number, or the funding disbursement name as the disbursement id, etc.
For amendments, I've seen people also create an auto-numbered name that follows all of the other auto-name for records OR simply adding a formula that appends .1, .2, .3, etc. to the end of a grant number.
Hope that helps!
