Pre-award module
Pre-award software for sponsored programs offices
Three people editing a proposal at once, budgets on your own rates, system-to-system submission, and a versioned institutional proposal the award will link to later.
The failure this replaces
Deadline day is a queue, and the queue is one spreadsheet.
The proposal itself is rarely the bottleneck. The bottleneck is that the budget lives with one person, the attachments with another and the approvals in an email chain, and they can only be assembled in sequence, so the last two days before a federal deadline are spent waiting for whoever has the file.
The other half is what happens after submission. Personnel change, a compliance area moves from pending to approved, a sponsor asks for a revised budget. Without a versioned master record those updates land in whatever document the person making them happened to open.
What it does
Building it, routing it, sending it
Three people in the proposal at once
Up to three users edit a development proposal at the same time: one in the budget, one uploading and editing attachments, one in the personnel, compliance and summary data. On a deadline day that is the difference between a queue and a team.
Budgets on your rates
Detailed and modular budgets built from your institution's own rates and object codes. The budget a sponsor sees and the budget your finance office recognises are the same document.
System-to-system submission
The same record that carries your internal approvals submits to Grants.gov through S2S, so the data collected for internal process does double duty and nobody re-enters it into a federal form.
A versioned institutional proposal
Finalising a development proposal creates the institutional proposal automatically, a master record you keep editing through the life of the submission as personnel are hired or a compliance area changes status.
A home for the ones that skipped the system
The proposal log records paper submissions and awards that predate an electronic proposal, so the record of what this office has submitted is complete, and doesn't begin the day the software was installed.
Forms your own administrators change
The institutional form builder puts your questions, your workflow and your routing in the hands of your staff. A new sponsor requirement in November is a configuration change, with no change request and no lead time.
The product itself
What the screens look like
Budgets on your rates
A versioned institutional proposal
A home for the ones that skipped the system
Forms your own administrators change
Why it is not a separate purchase
Everything downstream reads what you enter here
Pre-award is where every fact about a project is written down for the first time: the sponsor, the budget, the personnel, the compliance areas that need review. Every module after it either reads those facts or asks somebody to type them again.
In Streamlyne the institutional proposal is what an award links to and populates from, protocols attach to it through the same Streams function, and reporting reads across all of it.
- Proposal developmentThree concurrent editors, budgets, attachments
- S2S submissionGrants.gov from the same record
- Institutional proposalThe versioned master the award links to
- Proposal logPaper submissions and pre-electronic awards
- Form builderYour questions and routing, changed by your staff
Questions
What a sponsored programs office asks
What does pre-award software cover?
Everything between an idea and a submitted proposal: building the proposal and its budget, collecting the attachments and approvals your institution requires, routing it internally, and getting it to the sponsor. The part people underestimate is the routing. The writing is the researcher's job, and the queueing is where a sponsored programs office spends its week.
Can more than one person work on a proposal at the same time?
Yes, up to three concurrent editors on a development proposal, split by area: budget, attachments, and the rest of the record. It is a specific number, and it maps to how the work divides on a deadline.
Does it submit to Grants.gov directly?
Yes, through system-to-system submission from the same record that carried the internal approvals. The point is that the data was only entered once: the information collected to satisfy your own process is the information the federal form needs.
What is the difference between a development proposal and an institutional proposal?
The development proposal is the working document your team builds. When it is finalised, the institutional proposal is created automatically as the versioned master record, and that is what you keep editing afterwards, adding newly hired personnel or changing the status of a compliance area needing special review. It is also what an award links to when the money arrives.
What about proposals that never went through the system?
The proposal log exists for exactly that: paper submissions, and awards received before there was an electronic proposal to point at. Institutions that skip this end up with a system that can only answer questions about the period since it was installed, which is never the period anybody asks about.
Who changes the forms when a sponsor changes its requirements?
Your administrators, through the institutional form builder. Ask every vendor you evaluate this question, because the answer decides whether configuration is part of implementation or part of every year you own the system.