GRANT TRACKER®: A History
"May all of your grants be funded,
and your books always balance!"
In the "good old days" I had four NIH grants running at the same time, and many employees, but our Departmental Administrator couldn't administrate. After several large overdrafts on our grants, the faculty in our Division took over the accounts of their own grants.Programming computers was a hobby of mine, starting with the Sinclair and later the Morrow computer. So, when the IBM PC's came out , I decided to computerize the bookkeeping for our grants. GRANT TRACKER was born in 1986.
Grant Tracker 1.0 was written in QuickBASIC, and was pretty crude by today's standards, but it did the minimal task of keeping track of our grants. A lot of improvements had to be made in Grant Tracker to accommodate the fact that some of the secretaries in the Division were not that comfortable with computers, and after all, they were secretaries and not accountants. This required that the user interface of Grant Tracker be very intuitive, and that the manual be very informative about basic accounting problems, e.g., how to handle Blanket Orders, how to handle students who work variable hours and months, how to reconcile the accounts in Grant Tracker with the monthly expenditure statement from the University, etc. Ten upgrades were made in 1986.
Other people became interested in Grant Tracker as a way of solving their own grant accounting problems, so I decided to attempt to sell the program. The first copy sold was Version 1.8 in January 1987. Four more revisions were made in 1987.
In January of 1989, Version 3 was released for the MACINTOSH as well as for DOS. This was followed in 1991 with Version 4, and in 1992 with Version 4.5.
In 1994, Version 5 was released for WINDOWS, DOS, and MAC. Not surprisingly, the majority of our DOS customers opted to move to the WINDOWS version. Many of our customers who wanted to stay with DOS (it is a lot faster than WINDOWS), have reluctantly had to leave DOS because their institution has added network software to their computer, and this used up most of the 640 k of conventional memory that is needed to run DOS programs. The DOS and the WINDOWS versions of Grant Tracker looked and functioned the same, since they were both written in Visual Basic, and had a graphical user interface.
Grant Tracker Version 5 for the MAC is still in QuickBASIC, because Microsoft was supposed to release Visual Basic for the MAC in January 1994, but they didn't, and they probably never will.
Version 5.2 for WIN and MAC were released in September 1995. This version added several new features that were requested by our customers
Recently (1997), one of our oldest customers suggested that we incorporate some of the features of Quicken, a popular bookkeeping program, into Grant Tracker. After thinking about it, we decided to incorporate the unique features of Grant Tracker into Quicken. We began (1/15/98) offering a customized module for Quicken for tracking the budgets of grants, and our comprehensive manual teaches how to handle grant accounts.
One important feature of the new Grant Tracker is that the accounts, categories and subcategories that are preprogrammed can now be modified or deleted, and new accounts, categories and subcategories can be added. This gives the user complete flexibility, and makes Grant Tracker adaptable for any type of grant.
The current version (10/1/99) is Grant Tracker® 2000 for Macintosh and for Windows (95,98, NT4).
Grant Tracker® has been meeting the accounting needs of grant recipients since 1986.