General Reporting Requirement by Grant Type
ORGANIZATIONAL GRANTS.
General Support Grants
General support grants are awarded to support the operation of the grantee organization without restricting the funding to specific projects or activities. The grantee organization (U.S. public charity or equivalent) reserves the right to decide how to spend the funds consistent with the organization’s charitable mission.
The grantee is only required to submit an annual report outlining the organization’s work over the corresponding grant award term, in line with the organizational budget and strategy.
Organization-Level, Program-Level, and Project-Level Grants
Most grants awarded at OSF are organization-level, program-level, or project-level grants. (These are all considered types of project grants from the legal point of view in the United States.) These types ofgrants are restricted to support specific activities or programmatic work of the grantee as defined in a proposal narrative and budget.
OSF does not have unified, approved narrative or financial report templates. Grants management may provide guidance on narrative or financial report guidelines upon request from the program, although a number of programs have developed their own detailed narrative and financial reporting guidelines for grantees.
If there are multiple payments scheduled for a grant, payment is usually released after the interim reports have been approved by program staff (recommender) and the grants officer (although multiple grant payments scheduled because the overall grant amount is over $500,000 do not require reports before each installment).
At a minimum, the narrative report should explain activities of the grant including an overview of progress made toward the goals of the grant to date. The financial reports must detail the Grantee’s expenditure of the grant funds against the approved budget line items and include a clear balance of funds to date. Final reports should account for full expenditure of the grant and explain the project outcomes.
For grants to U.S. public charities or equivalents where the grantee has submitted a bifurcated lobbying/non-lobbying budget for the entire project, grantees don’t need to provide bifurcated reports, but they should provide an overall financial report for the entire project, including activities not funded by OSF funds. They should not attribute OSF funds to any specific activities, but the total income minus expenditures should imply that all funds from OSF were expended.
Expenditure Responsibility Grants (U.S. –funded grants to organizations that are not public charities or equivalent)
To comply with U.S. IRS regulations, Expenditure Responsibility Grants (ER Grants) require annual reports detailing the use of grant funds until all funds are fully expended or returned to OSF. A template for this report is available in Foundation Connect.
For each calendar year in which the grantee receives U.S. funds from OSF (even if OSF funds are disbursed in December), an annual report (ER report) has to be submitted by the grantee that contains:
- a narrative description of the activities undertaken by grantee with U.S. funds,
- a detailed financial report on how the grantee expended U.S. funds, compared to the approved grant budget, in the calendar year.
The annual report must be submitted to OSF within 90 days of the end of a calendar year, scheduled for March 31, where the grantee has already received U.S. funds. For ER grants including equipment purchases, the grantee must provide a list of items purchased. In addition, the grantee must continue to report on equipment for three years following the conclusion of the grant or for the useful life of purchases made. A summary of ER report scenarios and actions is provided in the table below.
In case of bifurcated grants (consisting of both U.S. and non-U.S. sourced funds), the reports should clearly distinguish between expenses coming from the different funding sources, following the format of the approved bifurcated grant budget. Funds from U.S. sources cannot be used for activities allocated to be funded from a non-U.S. funding source.
ER Report review guidance:
if we get into details regarding the type of support in this chapter, we should use the definition provided by GMSG.