We recently completed a project with a regional funder that supports nonprofits in educating and empowering Americans to work, live, and play outdoors. We have been working with this funder since 2021, building trust and mutual understanding throughout our engagements. Like many charitable organizations, they have a lot of reporting and financial due diligence to keep track of, and are working with a lean team who need to collaborate and share data constantly. Recently, they asked for support in monitoring and visualizing their financial data more efficiently—let’s dive into how we optimized and customized their Fluxx instance to better meet their needs.
The Situation:
Following their adoption of Fluxx as a grants management system a year prior, the team has been relying heavily on Fluxx’s budget summary dashboard to display how the organization’s funding sources were being spent across its programs and subprograms. However, they began noticing that the data displayed at the program summary level was incorrect, while in the backend it was fine. The subprogram level reports created by the funder also contained issues and outdated data, causing confusion for the grants team. Finally, the data would only represent a snapshot from a point of time; live, up to date data required running multiple reports and combining them.
This was an urgent problem, and the team expressed a preference for continuing to work within Fluxx as part of the solution—it was meeting all their other needs.
The Proposal:
Grantbook Fluxx experts combined their knowledge of effective, approved middleware to land on Workato as a solution, creating a database external to the Fluxx platform that allows users to slice and dice data however they need to—without compromising the integrity of the clean data stored in Fluxx. In consultation with the funder staff’s preferences, we built out a proof of concept: a live dashboard in Google Sheets, a tool they were already familiar with, to create a suite of at-a-glance summaries for financial and strategic planning.
As the team was already comfortable using both Workato and Google Sheets, they were able to build their own applications (charts, dashboards, pivot tables) based on the data exported from Fluxx. Our builders likened this to a “Lego approach”—all the pieces were provided, we just had to fit them together, rather than starting from scratch.
Note: while we considered using both Grantelligence and PowerBI, those options were somewhat overkill (and overpriced) for what the team needed. We may revisit this in the future as their data needs evolve.
The Tech Specs:
Workato uses ‘recipes’ to build and customize automations. In this recipe, our builders placed the most value on the ease of triggering the workflow for users, mitigation of large amounts of input, and protecting accurate data while encouraging team members to manipulate it.
One of the most impactful, and helpful, processes that this foundation has been diligent about is their taxonomy. Their internal terms and definitions are clearly defined and recorded, ensuring that each team member has a strong understanding of what areas, programs, and sub-programs fund, and how they are distinct from each other. Data is only as good as its sources, after all!
Ease of Recipe Trigger
Right at the top of the Google Sheet is a colourful button labelled “TRIGGER” - within seconds, the sheet is populated with fresh data. This benefits users who don’t need to understand or work with financial data as part of their role, or may not have the permissions to do so based on privacy and sharing limitations.
The updates within the sheet filter in tab by tab, as the API calls for each subprogram based on ID number and adds the new data into the spreadsheet.
Large Data Handling
The funder handles thousands of grant requests, which can overwhelm any workflow (or human). To mitigate this influx of data, we built a failsafe into the recipe to create a helper list when the API calls. As Workato sets a limit of 500 responses per page, we set a new API call to trigger for each individual page, ensuring all the exported data ends up in the right place without causing any errors.
As Workato pulls this data, it logs errors with specific codes, including the time and location of the issue.
Protecting Core Financial Data
One of the major benefits of hosting this live database externally to Fluxx is that it avoids the human error of staff members mis-allocating or mislabelling funds within the grants management system itself. If any staff member accidentally edits a cell or piece of data, a simple refresh using the button at the top of the page will rectify the information back to the correct amounts.
The Outcome:
Now, when any member of the team pulls up their summary dashboard within Google Sheets, they can see the overall budget, including funding sources, outgoing payments, what is accrued and what is coming up in the pipeline, as well as what percentage of funds for each program remains unplanned.
We have made this daily process much more clear, efficient, and user friendly: multiple separated tabs, divided by program and subprogram, helps staff understand at a glance where funds are going, and what remains unallocated in each stream.
It’s a dream come true for this foundation: they now have reliable, accessible data that the entire team can refer to and visualize based on their individual needs, as well as a static, secure financial management system safely within Fluxx. It was a true learning experience for the Grantbook team as well—needing to compensate for multiple Workato recipes caused challenges, and creating a connected, yet secure, live dashboard presented an interesting exercise in privacy best practices (and user experience considerations).
We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the team at the foundation for their trust and partnership throughout this engagement; cheers to a fruitful future together, for the good of people and planet!
