A grant paid out against milestones, each with deliverables and a capped amount I was allowed to spend. As an individual grant-holder I funded everything from my own pocket, so I had to tie every receipt to the right milestone and category to get each payment back, report my over and under-spend at monthly check-ins, and submit it all through the funder's dashboard. Done by hand it was eating 16 to 24 hours a month.
I built a relational Airtable system that assigns every receipt to a milestone and a spend category, rolls it up against each milestone's cap with live budget-variance, and reconciles every receipt against a real bank or card statement so the whole claim is auditable.
Monthly reporting dropped from 16 to 24 hours to under 4, and stayed there for the life of the grant. The full £16,285 across five milestones was tracked to the penny through to final close-out in 2026, with no nasty surprises at a check-in and no scramble at submission time.
The hard part is the data model, not the tooling. Link receipts, categories and milestones cleanly, and the variance, the reconciliation and the reporting all fall out of it for free.