Northern Lights Software Associates Information

Northern Lights Software has been in the grant accounting software business since 1984. Today, we continue to work together with industry experts, principal investigators and end-users to keep our programs up-to-date and moving forward. Our on-going task is to discover and fine-tune the best approach and easiest-to-use software solutions to grant administrators' daily tasks and increasingly complex accounting and data tracking problems. Grant Manager 10 is the culmination of a multi-year co-operative effort between our system designers, programmers, and a large number of professors, accountants and grant administrators from universities across the United States and abroad. To date, over 4,000 customers have installed our software, and most of them continue to rely on it daily to keep track of grant expenditures, inventories, vendor catalogs, and complex personnel cost calculations. Most of our customers use Grant Manager as a shadow accounting system. Just like an individual keeps a checkbook registry to balance his/her checkbook periodically against bank statements, so do most university departments keep their own "checkbook registries" to make sure that their accounts are handled accurately by "the bank", i.e. their institution's main accounting department. However, because university accounting is a much more complex task than balancing an individual checking account, many things can and do go wrong in the main accounting department. Overhead and fringe calculations may be off on individual transactions, wrong accounts may be accidentally debited for some salaries or purchases, credits and transfers may lose their way from point A to point B, etc. This is exactly where the Grant Manager software can be of tremendous assistance. For example, you can tell it exactly how much to charge overhead and fringe for each category in each account, and where to make exceptions. You can capture all of your expenditures, credits, transfers and other transactions, and generate real-time, clear, complete and easy-to-read ...