Funder reports broken into tasks and subtasks

How the Non-profit pack turns a signed grant's reporting duties into tasks and subtasks, with overdue and due-today counts on the home page.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 4 min read · For Non-profit businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.

Winning a grant feels like the finish line. Then the agreement arrives, and somewhere in its schedules is a list of reports: a narrative every six months, a financial report each quarter, a final report with audited figures, perhaps a site visit and a list of beneficiaries. Each one has a due date, a format and a person at the funder who will notice if it is late.

In many organisations those obligations live in the director's head or in a spreadsheet that one person updates. When that person is on leave, or leaves, the next report is missed, and the funder's first real impression of your organisation is a polite reminder.

The Non-profit & fundraising pack in Achekam's Industry CRM gives the reports a place in the same workflow that won the grant, and lets your team break each one into pieces small enough to finish.

Reports start where the grant agreement ends

The pack takes a grant application from research to submission, with a director's approval, to a grant agreement signed electronically by the funder, and then to the reports the funder requires. Reporting is not a separate system you remember to open; it is the stage that follows the signature.

That ordering has a practical benefit. Nobody can lose track of a grant between "we won it" and "the first report is due", because the record moves straight from the signed agreement into the reporting stage. Read the agreement's reporting schedule as soon as it is signed and capture every report, with its due date and format, while the detail is fresh.

Tasks, subtasks and sub-subtasks

A single funder report is too large to be one task. "Submit the half-year report" sits on a list for weeks because nobody knows where to start.

In the Industry CRM, tasks can have subtasks up to three levels deep. That is enough to mirror how a report is really built. One way to lay out a half-year report:

• Half-year report to the funder (the task)
• Narrative section
• Collect activity figures from each project site
• Choose two short stories and confirm consent from the people in them
• Financial section
• Close the months in the period
• Prepare the budget comparison for the grant's accounts
• Director's review and submission

Agree an owner for each line and give it a due date. The field coordinator knows the site figures are theirs and when they are needed; the bookkeeper owns the month closes; the director owns only the final review, which waits until everything beneath it is done.

Keep the structure shallow where you can. Three levels is a ceiling, not a target, and a report broken into dozens of tiny tasks is as hard to follow as one big one.

Tasks that appear stage by stage

A workflow creates its tasks stage by stage. The reporting tasks do not clutter anyone's list while the application is still in research or waiting for the director's approval; they appear when the grant reaches the stage that needs them.

Plan reporting the same way. When one report is submitted, set up the tasks for the next, rather than loading every report for a multi-year grant on the first day. Your team then sees the next thing to do, not the whole mountain.

Overdue and due today on the home page

The pack's home page shows counts, and every count comes from records, tasks or the ledger. None is typed in by hand. Among them are overdue tasks, tasks due today and key dates in the next 7 days.

For reporting, those three counts are an early-warning system. A rising overdue figure in the week before a report is due tells the director to step in while there is still time. Because nobody types the numbers in, nobody can make them look better than they are, and a board member who asks "are we on top of our funder reports?" can be shown the same counts the team sees.

Each industry pack sets the words the screens use, its record types, workflows, reminders and home-page counts, so these are part of the Non-profit pack as you switch it on.

Who owns the narrative and who owns the figures

Most late reports are late because two halves were written by different people who did not talk. Settle ownership when the grant is signed:

The narrative and the figures must tell the same story. If the narrative says a training cohort was postponed, the financial section should show the training budget underspent, with the same explanation. Put a subtask under the director's review for exactly that check.

For the figures themselves, tracking grant spending against the budget explains how to build the comparison from the ledger. For the earlier stages, from research to the signed agreement, see grant applications from research to funder reports, and for the gifts that fund your unrestricted work, recording gifts by fund and campaign.

Asking funders for simpler reports

Not every reporting burden is fixed. Some funders are moving towards lighter reporting, and the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project's six practices of trust-based grantmaking include simplifying and streamlining the applications and reports funders ask of grantees. If a funder's schedule asks for more than the grant's size justifies, it is reasonable to ask, before signing, whether one combined report would do.

Take the reporting schedule from your most recent grant agreement and sketch its first report as a task with subtasks. If you cannot name an owner for every line, that is the conversation to have this week.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.