Replace Your Last Shadow System — Not Just Your Spreadsheets
Sponsored programs offices have been building workarounds for years — departmental trackers, shared-drive budget files, spreadsheets that one person understands — because their official systems don't answer the operational questions they need answered. ForecastFR is built to answer those questions directly, so the workarounds can stop.
Used by research administrators at federally sponsored institutions. Pre-award planning · Post-award monitoring · Audit-ready documentation.
SPOs Manage Too Many Awards With Too Little Visibility
Excel WIP Schedules Break
Manual budget tracking in spreadsheets creates version control problems and takes hours that should go to awards management. And when the person who built the tracker leaves, the institutional knowledge leaves with them.
End-of-Award Surprises
Budget shortfalls, salary gaps, and no-cost extension requests surface at the last minute instead of 6 months out.
Your Portfolio Lives in Five Different Systems
Sponsored programs has its trackers. Departmental finance has its own. Central research administration has a third set. When leadership asks which awards are at risk, no single system can produce the answer — and someone has to reconstruct the picture manually before the office can address the actual question.
Data Gets Entered Twice
Compliance requires data in the ERP. Operational questions require data in the shadow system. So the same information goes in both places, on different schedules, with different assumptions — until the numbers stop meaning one thing.
ForecastFR Replaces Reactive Budget Management With Proactive Award Intelligence
Real-Time Burn Rate Analysis
Track actual vs projected burn rates across every award line item. Get alerts when burn deviates from plan by more than 10%.
Salary Runway Projections
Calculate months of salary coverage remaining on each award based on current commitments and burn rate. Flag awards approaching zero runway.
End-of-Award Forecasting
Project final budget position at award end date using current trajectory. Identify awards requiring NCE requests 90 days in advance.
Budget Deviation Alerts
Automatic alerts when budget categories deviate from approved limits. Flag potential §200.405 allocability issues before they become findings.
AI Budget Intelligence
Ask budget questions in plain English. ForecastFR's Claude integration answers with live award data and regulation citations.
Audit-Ready Documentation
Export budget narratives, variance explanations, and supporting documentation formatted for A-133 audits and sponsor reporting.
Institutional Memory That Doesn't Walk Out the Door
When a grants administrator moves to a new role, their award knowledge stays in ForecastFR — not in a spreadsheet only they understood. Every burn rate history, every rate override, every budget narrative is stored in a shared system, accessible to whoever takes over the portfolio.
Stop Managing Versions. Start Managing Awards.
When five people each maintain their own tracker for the same portfolio, "the numbers" stop meaning one thing. A PI asks for a budget update and gets a different figure depending on which spreadsheet the answer came from. None of the numbers are necessarily wrong — they're just current as of different moments, built on different assumptions, scoped slightly differently.
ForecastFR gives every person in the office — post-award administrators, SPO directors, PI financial assistants, and departmental finance — the same live picture of every award. The same burn rate. The same salary runway. The same projected end balance. When leadership asks a portfolio-wide question, the answer comes from one system, not from a manual reconciliation of everyone's individual files.
Built on 2 CFR 200 Uniform Guidance
Every budget alert, variance flag, and forecast in ForecastFR maps to a specific Uniform Guidance regulation. Your team always knows the regulatory basis for every compliance action.
How It Works
Connect or Import Your Data
Connect directly to Banner (via Ethos), Workday, PeopleSoft, or Oracle Cloud via REST API for live sync — or import CSV exports from any ERP as a starting point. ForecastFR maps your chart of accounts automatically. API connections eliminate the re-entry problem. CSV import eliminates the setup barrier.
Configure Award Parameters
Set budget periods, effort commitments, and alert thresholds per award. Takes under 5 minutes per award.
Monitor and Forecast
ForecastFR runs continuous burn analysis and surfaces alerts, forecasts, and compliance flags in real time.
ForecastFR + Claude AI
ForecastFR includes a native MCP connector for Claude Desktop and Claude.ai. The AI doesn't just answer questions when you ask — it surfaces what you need to know before you think to ask. Which awards are trending toward overspend. Which PIs have salary gaps opening in the next 90 days. Which portfolios haven't been reviewed since last quarter. The pattern recognition that used to require an afternoon of spreadsheet reconciliation, surfaced automatically.
Connect ForecastFR to ClaudeBuilt for Research Administration
Post-Award Administrators
Manage 50+ awards without missing a budget deviation or salary gap.
Sponsored Programs Directors
Portfolio-level visibility across your entire institution's federal awards.
PI Financial Assistants
Give PIs real-time budget dashboards without spreadsheet maintenance.
One Line for Every Institution Type
Stop returning funds at closeout.
Award monitoring in minutes, not days.
Federal compliance without a dedicated grants office.
Every federal dollar tracked, compliant, and fully utilized.
Your federal grants come with the same Uniform Guidance as Harvard's. Your software shouldn't be Excel.
NIH salary cap, effort certification, and runway — monitored automatically.
Why We Built ForecastFR
The research administration problem isn't a reporting problem. It's an operational visibility problem.
Why ERP Reports Fail Research Administrators
Standard reports are backward-looking. Forecasting is a forward-looking exercise. Why the tools institutions have don't match the job they need done.
ReadThe Spreadsheet Isn't the Problem
Why sponsored programs teams still manage million-dollar portfolios in spreadsheets — and why the spreadsheet itself isn't what needs to change.
ReadThe Hidden Cost of Shadow Systems
When the spreadsheet symptom hardens into infrastructure: knowledge loss, duplicate work, version fragmentation, and operational blindness.
ReadStop Reacting to Budget Problems. Start Forecasting Them.
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