Not every proposal arrives ready to approve. A date is wrong, a cost line is missing, a reviewer wants more detail before signing off. Small corrections happen on most submissions. The question is whether your grants management system lets an approver send a proposal back with a note, or forces them to press reject.

When reject is the only option, it becomes the default. The proposal stops. Nobody tells the applicant automatically what needs fixing, so someone on your research administration team emails or calls them. An administrator resets the status manually so the proposal can be resubmitted, and approval starts again from the beginning. None of this is recorded in the system, and none of it is fast. More proposals means more correction cycles running at once, and less time before a funder deadline when one takes longer than it should.

GrantsNow builds “Send Back for Rework” into every approval step. The approver writes a note, the proposal goes back to the right person, and the applicant sees a notification in GrantsNow instead of a separate email or call. They correct, resubmit, and approval continues from the same point. No administrator steps in, nothing is reset manually, and the note stays in GrantsNow, so the correction trail is there at audit time. Routing corrections this way reduces pre-award admin time per submission by around 45 per cent.

Download the white paper to see how GrantsNow handles each stage of the correction and approval cycle, or schedule a short demo