SAP Grantor Management solution is designed for public sector organisations that administers funds to provide financial assistance to a group of individuals or organisations. Grants are financial assistance arrangements, where the grantee receives funds to carry out a program or provide services.
It is an end-to-end solutions that covers from the initial planning to the final payment and reconciliation.
In Grants Management, the public agency distributing the money is known as the Grantor, and the receiving organisation/person that is recipient of the grants is known as the Grantee.
The business processes includes the following steps:
SAP Grantor Solution is based on SAP CRM 7 with SAP ECC Funds Management or SAP ECC Public Sector integration.
1 - Program Management:
The SAP Solutions offers the ability to administer the funds, using SAP Grantor Program.
SAP Grantor Program allows the definition of policies or regulations that are adopted by public sector organisations to deliver the external funding. The program defines how the grant activities are managed and funded, and controls how grants are delivered to grantee.
Basis features includes:
- Allows definition of unique funding policies, applicant criteria and approval process; by unique assignment of forms, questionnaires, rules and process.
- Can be represent in hierarchical structures.
- Time-dependent activation of business process, controlling when the grantor characteristics are available to the public: application submission period, agreement period, claim period, change request period.
- Master data integrated with SAP ECC Funds Management (Funds Programs).
With SAP Funds Management integration, the program planning is controlled:
- Grantor Program are represented as Funds Program allowing the account assignment determination (transaction FMMEASURE - Funded Program Maintain ). GTRDerive tool is used for derivation of the ERP account assignments
In conclusion the Grantor Program allows to represent the different grants programs that are available to the public, e..g: sport, arts, science, community development, health; with their unique characteristics: eligibility, assessment, payment strategies. When some grantor programs don't change over time, the solution allows program to be defined with no end period (31.12.999) or the flexibility to have different program every certain period.
2- Budgeting
Grantor Solution integrates with SAP ERP Budget and Control System (BCS). The solution ensures that grants payments are managed within the operating budget to ensure approved funds are not exceeded, and the organisation mantains accountability for grants committed and paid.
Budget encumbrance can be triggered from an application (pre-commitment) and/or agreement (commitment) in the form of an earmarked funds document.
Program budget are maintained in SAP ECC (transaction FMBB - Budgeting Workbench) .
3- Application:
Grantor Application defines how the application processing, eligibility assessment and award amounts are managed.
Grantor Program controls the differences between different applications eligibility period, application forms and Funds Integration. One big plus is a same application transaction could be used across different programs with the option to assign different assessment; giving flexibility to the organisation to implement new grantor programs with low new customizing.
Standard features available in CRM transaction types are available with SAP Grantor Application controlling the processing, such as:
- Partner Management: The grantor, legal represents (contact person), external parties (external assessors,other governments agencies) and employees involved in the assessment are represented as business partner.
- Dates Management: Application received on, application processing duration, application start, application end date and any other dates/milestone are managed using Date Management.
- Status Management: All steps involved in the application processing could be represent as status: Draft, Received, In process, For Approval, Withdrawal/ Cancel, Approved, etc.
- Notes: approval/rejections comments, internal comments, notes to print; could be managed by using Text.
- Follow up documents, attachments, document templates...
The use of applications is optional. A SAP agreement could be configured with status to represent that is in assessment. The advantage of having a grantor application is that funds pre-commitments are separated from the actual commitments (Agreements). For reporting purposes having different transaction types, facilitates the reporting of different metrics for applications/agreements.
Applications are submitted by different channels. SAP supports online applications forms (BSP+ HTML or Adobe Interactive Forms) by using SAP CRM Web Request functionality. A template model is delivered within the solution, but each implementations requires to develop their own template according to the grantor programs/characteristics.
SAP manages the following funding types, which are available to manage the financial aspects of the grant:
- Requested Amount: the amount requested by the grantee.
- Authorized Amount: the final application amount that is actually granted.
- Eligible Amount: the amount to which the applicant is entitled determined by the program rules.
Additionally, the solution allows to distinguish various payment terms:
- Payment
- Advance
- Repayment
- Holdback
The grantor application displays "Availability Control (AVC) message" from SAP ERP.
Application Total amounts are replicated to SAP ECC Funds Management as Funds Pre-commiment.
Transaction FMRP_RFFMEP1AX
Funds Pre-commitment (Transaction FMY3)
As conclusion, the Grantor Application contains all data on application for a grant made by a potential grantee.
...To be continued
http://scn.sap.com/community/crm/blog/2013/08/13/introduction-to-sap-grantor-management--part-ii
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