Switching from GrantHub: A Migration Guide for Nonprofits

GrantHub Pro tracked the first half of the grants management lifecycle: finding grant opportunities, moving applications through pipeline stages, and knowing when decisions and reports were due. That half was useful. It was also only half the problem.

The organizations that migrate most smoothly from GrantHub are the ones that understand this from the start. They do not treat the migration as a data transfer. They treat it as the opportunity to build the post-award compliance infrastructure that GrantHub’s scope never included.

What GrantHub Was Actually Tracking

GrantHub Pro managed grant applications and funder relationships. The core record was an opportunity: a grant you were pursuing or had received. Each opportunity had a status (researching, drafting, submitted, awarded, declined), a funder, an award amount, deadline dates, and notes.

The pipeline view showed all your grant opportunities by stage. The calendar showed upcoming deadlines. The funder profile stored contact history and relationship notes.

This is genuinely useful information. Development directors with 20 or 30 active grant applications benefit from a central place to track where everything stands.

What GrantHub did not capture: what happened after the award arrived.

There was no field for “approved budget by category.” No mechanism for modeling a grant’s restrictions - whether it was program-restricted, time-restricted, or unrestricted. No way to track expenditures against the approved budget. No functionality for generating the financial reports funders require after they award you money.

Organizations that used GrantHub managed post-award compliance with a parallel system: typically one spreadsheet per active grant, updated manually after each accounting entry, reformatted by hand for each funder report.

What the Sunset Means for Your Data

GrantHub Pro access ended on January 31, 2026. If you had an active account before that date, you had the opportunity to export your data before access closed.

The export file from GrantHub contains:

• Grant/opportunity records: name, funder, award amount, status, project period
• Funder contact records: names, titles, email addresses, phone numbers
• Application notes and history
• Deadline records

The export does not contain:

• Expenditure data (GrantHub never tracked expenditures)
• Restricted fund balances (GrantHub never modeled fund restrictions)
• Approved budget breakdowns by category
• Compliance documentation

This is important context for the migration. The GrantHub export is a starting point, not a complete picture. The data you need to run a compliant grant portfolio is mostly not in the export file.

Before You Evaluate a Replacement

Before you evaluate replacement platforms, spend time on your current portfolio. The evaluation will be meaningless if you do not know what you actually need the replacement to do.

Pull together this information for every active grant:

Award basics: Funder name, grant name, award amount, project period start and end date, award date.

Approved budget: The budget breakdown from the award letter - every line item and its approved amount. This is the compliance baseline. Every expenditure must fall within an approved category, and the total cannot exceed the award amount.

Restriction type: Is the grant restricted to a specific program, a specific activity, a specific geography, or a specific population? Is any portion unrestricted? Understanding the restriction type tells you how closely expenditures must be tracked against scope.

Reporting schedule: Every due date for every required report - interim financial, interim programmatic, final financial, final programmatic. Note whether each report is submitted through a portal, by email, or on a specific form.

Status: How much has been spent to date in each budget category? When did you last report to the funder? Are there any open compliance issues or budget modifications in process?

Prior approval requirements: What changes require advance funder approval? Common triggers: key personnel changes, equipment purchases above a threshold, budget modifications above the rebudgeting limit, no-cost extension requests.

This audit typically takes one to two days. It surfaces information that was scattered across GrantHub, your accounting system, email, and institutional memory.

Evaluating GrantHub Replacements

The market for nonprofit grant management software has two distinct product types, and choosing the wrong one will put you back where you started.

Pipeline trackers. These products replicate what GrantHub did: grant application management, deadline tracking, funder contact management, pipeline stages. They are useful for pre-award grant seeking. They do not solve post-award compliance.

Grant management systems. These products cover both pre-award and post-award: application tracking, restricted fund management, expenditure documentation, budget-vs-actual monitoring, compliance reporting. They are more complex and typically more expensive, but they cover the full lifecycle.

If your primary challenge was the GrantHub sunset - you liked GrantHub’s pipeline tracking and just need something comparable - a pipeline tracker replacement makes sense. If your challenge was that GrantHub left the compliance half of the problem unsolved, a pipeline tracker replacement replicates your existing gap.

Questions to ask any replacement platform during evaluation:

1. Can the system model grant fund restrictions and track a running balance against the approved budget by category?
2. Does the system track expenditures linked to specific grants and budget lines?
3. Can the system generate SF-425 quarterly financial reports from actual expenditure data?
4. What does compliance report generation look like for private foundation funders with different report formats?
5. Does the system include a donor CRM, or does it require a separate system for individual giving?
6. What does the migration path from GrantHub look like - is there an import tool for the export file?

The Field Mapping Exercise

Once you select a replacement platform, map your GrantHub data fields to the new system’s data model before you begin importing.

Typical GrantHub-to-replacement field mapping:

Fields that GrantHub did not have - and that you will need to create in the replacement system:

• Budget categories with approved amounts
• Restriction type
• Year-to-date expenditures by category
• Fund balance remaining by category

Running a Parallel Period

Do not cut over immediately after import. Run a parallel period of 30-60 days in which you maintain both the replacement system and your existing compliance workflow.

During the parallel period:

• Enter all new activity in the replacement system
• Continue maintaining your existing spreadsheets or workflow
• At each reporting event, produce the report from both the old and new system and verify the numbers match
• Flag discrepancies and investigate the source before concluding the parallel period

The parallel period is insurance. It confirms that the replacement system is producing accurate numbers before you retire the old workflow. An error discovered during the parallel period is easy to fix. An error discovered after decommissioning the old system - when you no longer have a reference point - is harder.

After You Cut Over

When the parallel period confirms the replacement system is accurate, retire the old workflow.

Archive your GrantHub export files in your document management system. Per 2 CFR 200.334 and standard grant record retention practice, keep grant records for a minimum of three years from the submission date of the final expenditure report - longer for some federal programs. Even if the GrantHub platform is gone, the export files are grant records worth preserving.

Update your internal documentation to reflect the new system. If your grants manager’s departure procedures reference GrantHub or specific spreadsheets, update them. The institutional knowledge about your grant portfolio should live in the new system, not in files that only one person knows how to navigate.

Download the GrantHub Migration Checklist for a step-by-step checklist version of this guide - formatted for a grants manager with 30 days to complete the migration.