Bothy vs. a spreadsheet

The TL;DR

• Stick with the spreadsheet ifyou have under ~12 active grants, one person tracking them, and zero post-award reporting load. You probably don't need a tool yet — and a tool you don't need is a tool you'll resent.
• The trade-off flips between 20 and 35 active grants. Past that, the workarounds (separate tabs for tasks, contact log, reporting) stop staying in sync, and the cost of one missed renewal usually exceeds a full year of Bothy.
• The hidden cost isn't the spreadsheet — it's when the grant manager leaves.Half the funder context lived in their head. The next person can't recover it from the file alone. We've heard this story enough times that we built the product around preventing it.

The five things the spreadsheet always breaks first

Every spreadsheet-to-tool migration we've done starts because one of these five things finally broke:

1. 1. The stewardship tab drifts

   You add a “Stewardship” tab. It works for two months. Then someone updates a grant on the Pipeline tab but forgets to update the same grant on the Stewardship tab. Now the two tabs disagree, and nobody knows which is right. You stop trusting the Stewardship tab. Eight months later you find out you never sent a thank-you to a $40K funder.

2. 2. The funder profile doesn't exist

   Your board chair asks at the meeting: “What's going on with the Norton relationship?” There is no Norton view. There's a row for the Norton grant on the Pipeline tab, a row on the Stewardship tab, an email thread in someone's inbox, and a notes doc. You answer from memory. The pattern repeats every meeting.

3. 3. Post-award reporting becomes a chase

   The grant is won. The award letter has 14 reporting requirements buried in three sections. By the time you submit the first interim report, you've already missed a documentation deadline you didn't see. There's a Reporting tab somewhere but it has six grants on it from 2023 with no status, and you stopped opening it.

4. 4. The lapsed-funder cliff

   You realize one quiet Tuesday that you haven't talked to a $50K renewing funder in 16 months. The renewal application was due last week. There is no system that would've told you — the spreadsheet doesn't know when you last touched a funder, because nobody logged it.

5. 5. The grant manager leaves

   The most expensive failure mode. The spreadsheet captures structure (dates, amounts, statuses). It doesn't capture the conversational context — why Jennifer at Gheens was an internal champion, why the program officer at the family foundation wants a different framing, who introduced you to the corporate giving lead. That context lived in the grant manager's head. When they leave, you lose it. Renewal rates drop. We've heard this story enough times that the whole product is shaped around preventing it.

A note on Airtable, Monday, ClickUp

Some teams build a grant tracker in Airtable or a project-management tool like Monday or ClickUp. Those are real upgrades from a flat spreadsheet — relational tables, automations, multi-user. They also have the same problem the spreadsheet does, scaled up: you're building the schema for grant management from scratch, you're responsible for maintaining it, and the workflows specific to grants — award letter ingestion, renewal cultivation, lapsed-funder detection, post-award reporting — are still on you to construct.

That's often worth it for the first 6 months. By month 12 it's usually a half-functional fork of a grant tool, maintained by the person who would otherwise be writing grant proposals.

Read more before deciding

• Bothy vs. GrantHub — for orgs still working from a CSV export →

  If you're cross-shopping after the GrantHub sunset.

• Bothy vs. Instrumentl — when the funder database matters →

  ~72% cheaper at entry tier. Where each one actually wins.

• Bothy pricing →

  Solo $99/mo. $50/mo for orgs under $100K revenue.