Foundant Grant Lifecycle Manager vs. Workday Financial Management

This product is great and well-suited for smaller organizations who are interested in doing an online grantmaking system for the first time or upgrading from a simple survey-type application. You would love this product for basic applications and reports; [...] [its also great] if you want to do some light reporting. This is not a product that is robust enough to handle complex budgets, contact or email management, or complex outcomes metrics. It also will not work if you are trying to track your conversations with potential grantees before they apply.

Incentivized

Our primary model for budgeting revenue is centered on patient counts. Missed assumptions early in the year result in massive ramifications over the balance of the year. Workday formulas allowed us to write formulas to project the recovery of such shortfalls over a variable length of time, resulting in realistic projections for overcoming said shortfalls.

Incentivized

• Customer Service: Foundant is always super helpful and speedy in their responses to my questions, whether it's an email or call.
• Connections to other users: There's a great online community that's willing to share what works for their organizations.
• Company Response/Development: Foundant is continually updating (where it needs to) to make their product the best it can be, and is willing (and does) take comments and suggestions from clients for how the software could be improved.
• Training: A variety of training options- ranging from in person conferences to web-based tutorials. Very helpful, and updated as the product is.

Incentivized

• We specically wanted a cloud financial management system that we could use in China and communicate reports to the headquarters organization and roll-up reporting. It performs well.
• It was reasonably priced since we are not a for-profit company and need the Workday flexibility for finance and accounting operations. Most of our requirements are met with this one system.
• The system worked efficiently with the additional security we built on to keep confidential. Many reports are ready off-the-shelf or easy to develop, which is a strength.

Incentivized

• I don't think about what's lacking. This is much better than our previous grants management software.
• The landing page could have a snappier design.
• I wish our grantees could see more than one follow-up for a process at a time. Sometimes there needs to be a project mod submitted while that is an active renewal going on.

Incentivized

• The automatic save function isn't always active for the cloud version. I'm not sure if it is a glitch or a settings issue.
• There are some limitations to customizations.
• Updates don't go through properly on the system, leading to downtime issues.

Incentivized

Workday Financial Management is an easy to use, productive software suite that really brings all departments together and improved workplace efficiency. Before we began using the software, much info was partitioned in random places that were not clearly labeled or accessible to all shareholders. We are very pleased with Workday Financial Management.

Incentivized

Our support team has been awesome. They are extremely knowledgeable and have been able to guide us through all of the challenges we have faced. Workday's community online is also extremely helpful with many trainings and help topics that can be reviewed at your convenience.

Incentivized

I used GIFTS more than 10 years ago. Their development was glacial, and it was clumsy software. They took much longer to develop the on-line application process.
I also reviewed Philan Tech. They did not offer the same flexibility that Foundant's GLM did. Nor did the company have the depth of software engineering experience that Philan Tech had at the time.
Finally, I used a back-office support company for a short time that has an on-line grant management component. This option proved to be too cumbersome and too expensive. And I did not personally get along with the staff there. Definitely not a good fit for the Replogle Foundation and me.

Incentivized

The application data of users in the case of PeopleSoft is stored in its proprietary data storage, whereas Workday Financial Management connects to outside databases to create analytics reports. Therefore, this option uplifts the need to use Workday Financial Management as an interactive tool of business intelligence. The release model of Workday Financial Management is ahead of Oracle because it has a continual announcement of more functionality that is a very attractive incentive for our project management team for improving and developing the ongoing operational streams.

Incentivized

• This software has made it much easier to work with reviewers (panels of community volunteers who provide scores and comments for the grant applications). While we only use the Evaluator function for two of our many grant programs, the merge templates have saved a lot of time in assembling the materials to send digitally (one PDF per application) for the other grant programs. In our old database, I had to download each document from the application, convert to PDF, then combine. That was very labor intensive! In this software, I create a merge template and all the documents that I want included are automatically converted to PDF, in the order I want them. This was a big reason we moved to this software and it continues to be a fantastic feature.
• The automatic email reminders that have been built into the software (this is one example of an excellent improvement that has been added since we got the software - showing their constant efforts to get even better) have saved a lot of time and effort. I used to set reminders on my calendar every year to write a long involved email to all the grantees for a particular grant program, to remind them to submit their grant reports. And then, if they still forgot, I had to chase them down. Now, I just set up the reports in the software and there is an automatic reminder that goes out two weeks before; if they still forget, there is an automatic reminder that goes out one day after the deadline to let them know that it's late. I still have to chase a few of them down but the majority are taken care of.

Incentivized

• Workday has helped my employer save money over the past couple of year by tracking time of employees and how long were days looking like.
• It has enables us to make better decisions by hiring more people instead of paying overtime to those who already work in order to have the right work/leisure balance
• The platform has also helped us to redesign our policies after seeing when employees were clocking in and clocking out and track people who were showing up late for work

Incentivized