By Diane Doucet – Dovico Co-Founder and Time Coach
Edited by: Jeff Nagle
Over the past 25 years, Dovico has been the recipient of many federal and provincial government contributions. This funding has been crucial to our growth and stability over the years.
For each submission, I was the portfolio manager responsible for the entire application process. I would also manage the communication and documentation for all approved contributions. Based on my experiences, and the experiences of others who I’ve talked to who have received similar funding, I understand the challenges that arise once a government contribution is approved.
The first challenge: Struggling with documenting on what work has been done.
Sometimes projects are complex and involve large working teams. If there’s no system in place to record descriptions of the completed work, it can be challenging to gather and accurately prepare project and task status reports to present to follow progress and submit claims effectively.
In the past, we’ve relied on the built-in task descriptions and grouping within Dovico Timesheet. With this handy tool, we tagged applicable projects and tasks that helped create accurate reports during each claim period. We saved a lot of time and had great confidence with our documentation.
The second challenge: Staff turnover.
Unfortunately, employees leave or switch to different departments. When they do, their time data can be saved in different places. With this separation, it can be difficult to piece together the different activities the person was working on.
Also, if there’s no process in place to record completed work and its related costs, it becomes nearly impossible to create an accurate report for the claim.
Things get even more complicated if the departing employee worked on more than one project during the claim period. Gathering this historical data from each department can become a nightmare and leads to a lot of wasted time.
The final challenge: Matching budgets with actuals.
Government grant program managers often face significant challenges with reporting time and expenses spent on a project versus the initial budget or the grant amount.
In some organizations, both the accounting department and the program manager need to track costs and compare against a budget for two entirely different purposes. Coming up with a consensus figure with decentralized data can make the claiming process very difficult.
In cases where we needed to track specific grant-related tasks and expenses, we’ve used Dovico Timesheet to capture the information. It provided us with the means to keep it centralized. And because the application is on the cloud, it’s easily accessible to view the information with minimal effort, regardless of geographic location.
Dovico Timesheet makes grant applications easier!
For time and expense tracking on government contributions, I’m happy to say that using our own Dovico Timesheet made the process a lot simpler and almost effortless.
Being able to create custom reports that tied directly into the applicable documentation saved us a lot of time. The time that we needed to focus on
Sometimes it’s OK to give yourself a pat on the back.
If you’re a company based in Canada, be sure to check out the following link to see what funding may be available to you: https://www.canada.ca/en/services/business/grants.html