Pre-award module
Submit the proposal you routed, not a copy of it
System-to-system submission to Grants.gov from the same record that carried your internal approvals — so the data is entered once and the two versions cannot drift.
The failure this replaces
The version that routed and the version that was submitted were not the same document.
It happens quietly. The proposal is approved internally, then someone assembles the federal package separately — and between the two, a budget line moves, a co-investigator is added, or a late change reaches one document and not the other.
Nobody discovers it on the day. It surfaces at award setup, or in an audit, when the approved record and the submitted record are compared and disagree about something that was never a decision, only a transcription.
What it does
One record, all the way out of the door
One record, two audiences
The information collected to support your internal processes and approvals does double duty for Grants.gov opportunities. It is the same proposal, not an export of it.
Submission from inside the proposal
The submission happens from the development proposal your team already built, so the version that routed internally and the version that reached the sponsor cannot differ.
The approvals are already attached
Routing, signatures and compliance status live on the record being submitted, which is what makes the last hour before a deadline a check rather than an assembly job.
An institutional proposal follows automatically
Finalising the development proposal creates the versioned master record, so the moment after submission is already accounted for rather than being somebody's reminder.
The paper ones still count
Not everything goes through S2S. The proposal log records paper submissions and pre-electronic awards, so the office's own record of what it has sent out is complete.
Built for the deadline, not the demo
Three people can be in the proposal at once — budget, attachments, and the rest — which is the difference between a team working and a queue forming on the day it matters.
Why it is not a separate purchase
Submission is the end of pre-award, not a product
S2S is sometimes sold as its own thing, which only makes sense if the proposal lives somewhere else. If it does, the connection between your routing and your submission becomes an integration to build and maintain.
Here it is the same record: built collaboratively, routed for approval, submitted to Grants.gov, then finalised into the institutional proposal an award will later link to. Nothing crosses a boundary, so nothing has to be reconciled across one.
- Proposal developmentWhere the record and its budget are built
- S2S submissionGrants.gov, from that same record
- Institutional proposalCreated on finalisation, versioned from then on
- Proposal logPaper submissions and pre-electronic awards
- AwardLinks to the institutional proposal and populates from it
Questions
What a pre-award team asks about S2S
What is system-to-system submission?
Submitting a federal application directly from your research administration system to Grants.gov, rather than downloading a package, filling it in separately and uploading it. The value is not the transmission — it is that the data only exists once, so the proposal that routed through your institution is the proposal the sponsor receives.
Do we still have to enter the federal forms separately?
No, and that is the whole point of the module. The data collected to support your internal processes and procedures serves the Grants.gov opportunity too. Where a sponsor asks for something your internal process does not, it is collected once, on the same record.
What happens to the proposal after it is submitted?
Finalising the development proposal creates the institutional proposal automatically — the versioned master record you keep editing as personnel change or a compliance area moves status. When the award arrives it links to that record and populates from it.
What about submissions that do not go through Grants.gov?
The proposal log exists for them: paper submissions, and awards received before there was an electronic proposal. Institutions that skip it end up with a system that can only answer questions about the period since it was installed, which is rarely the period being asked about.
Can several people work on a proposal at once before submission?
Up to three concurrently on a development proposal, split by area — one in the budget, one in attachments, one in personnel and compliance. It is a specific number rather than an unlimited promise, and it maps onto how deadline work actually divides.
Which interface does this run in?
Proposal development, where S2S submission lives, is the part of the system with the newer interface. We mention it because the compliance and award modules are still on the classic one, and it is better to know which is which before a demo than during it.