backed.giving: grants administration, from open round to acquittal

THE BRIEF

Funding money passes through seven stages before it reaches the ground, and most funders run those stages in seven different systems. Backed is the one record all seven share.

Grants software is usually a sales CRM with the labels changed, and it shows: a grant is not a deal, an applicant is not a lead, and the record has to survive an audit years after the people who made the decision have moved on. Backed runs the whole round instead – opening it, collecting applications, assessing them, deciding and telling people, contracting and varying, tracking delivery and acquittal, and paying and reconciling – with programme staff configuring their own forms, eligibility rules and assessment frameworks rather than raising a change request.

The seven phases only hold together because one entity record, one permission model and one audit trail run underneath all of them. That is what makes the behaviour possible: a declared conflict removes an assessor's access rather than warning them about it, the reasoning is stored beside the decision it explains, and a tranche will not pay until the report it depends on has landed. Nothing is re-keyed between stages, and nothing has to be reconstructed from files at the end.

It was specified before it was built – the requirements, the data model, every screen and every acceptance criterion written down first, which is 215 screens, 314 tables, 2,231 traced requirements and 4,081 acceptance criteria. Those are artefacts of the repository rather than customer outcomes, and the product says so itself. The data lives in Australia and stays there, on AWS ap-southeast-2, with the subprocessor list published rather than supplied on request.