by James Townsend Managing government and non-profit grants usually requires a combination of structured data along with documents to track all the information required for applications, review, award and post-award reporting. One of the more important design decisions you can make in implementing grant management software is to determine the proper place for structured data and documents, that is which information is stored where. By a structured database, I mean data that is divided into fields and records which is typically stored in a database. Structured data lends itself to validation, such as restricting entry to defined data types, making fields required, or checking the data entered against a rule such as minimum and maximum values. Documents are sometimes needed to capture less structured narrative such as a project description, or to print a well formatted paper document for a signature. Online documents can have some validation rules themselves, and even some logic such
From James Townsend, vice president of Sylogist, thoughts on digital transformation, marketing automation, customer relationship management, Power Apps , Microsoft Dynamics 365, government contracting, customer service and more.