Say a grant was approved some time ago, and now there’s an Official Information Act request, or your auditor wants to see how the decision was made. Who assessed the application? Against which criteria? Who approved it, and when? Could your team provide an answer from one place, or would it mean searching through inboxes, shared drives and spreadsheets?
The Auditor General’s good practice guidance on funding and grants (sometimes referred to as grant management guidelines) rests on six principles: accountability, openness, value for money, lawfulness, fairness and integrity, applied across four stages of a grant: planning, selection, monitoring and review. The guidance is not a software specification. What it asks is that entities can demonstrate how they’ve acted on those principles, and that is where good records matter.
This is where good practice becomes practical: having a complete, consistent audit trail created automatically as part of the work, rather than having to reconstruct records after the fact.
What the New Zealand Auditor General expects of grant administration, and how Klevr Grants supports good practice
| Grant stage | Description | Questions you may be asked |  How Klevr Grants helps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Planning | Setting purpose, criteria and decision-makers upfront | Were the fund’s purpose, criteria and decision-makers defined before applications opened? | Each fund and round is configured with its own application form, assessment criteria and approval workflow (all aligned to your delegations) before the first application arrives. Forms and requirements are built and published through your dedicated online portal, which syncs with Klevr Grants, so applicants see the correct criteria upfront and your team works from a single source of truth from day one. |
| Selection | Showing fair, consistent and transparent assessment | Who assessed each application? Against which criteria? Who approved it, and when? How were conflicts managed? | Structured assessment against your criteria by internal and external assessors, with approvals, timestamps, notes and communications all captured against the grant application record. This creates a clear, compliant audit trail showing exactly how each decision was made. |
| Monitoring | Proving payments and reporting matched the agreement | Were payments structured to manage risk, and was progress checked before further funds were released? Did reporting arrive on time? | Contracts, milestones and progress reports are tracked per grant in Klevr Grants, with the ability to integrate payments directly through your ERP platform (such as Business Central or Finance & Operations) or accounting platforms like Xero. This keeps financials visible and traceable. |
| Review | Understanding what the fund achieved overall | What did the funding achieve across the whole programme, not just project by project? | Outcome and financial reporting rolls up across rounds in Power BI, giving you programme-level insight without manual data pulls. Because all assessments, approvals, contracts, milestones and progress reports sit on the grant record (including milestone reports submitted by recipients through the online portal), Klevr provides a complete evidence base for transparent programme reporting. |
AI can support screening, with people making every decision
AI can support fairness when used carefully. The Klevr IQ grant submission evaluation agent can read incoming applications, score them against your eligibility criteria and flag those that meet them, giving assessors a structured first pass instead of a pile of unassessed applications. Assessors still make every assessment and every approval decision, but the AI agent can help process large volumes of applications against basic filters.
This aligns with the Public Service AI Framework, which encourages transparent, human‑centred and accountable use of AI. An explainable, logged first pass supports accountability better than an opaque one.
One place for all your grant related records, giving you a consistent audit trail built into everyday work.
Klevr Grants runs on Dynamics 365 and connects to SharePoint, Outlook and Power BI, so documents, correspondence and reporting sit with the grant, not scattered across systems. Applicants submit and track progress through a secure portal, and your team works from the same central grant record.
Walkerscott is an approved supplier on the New Zealand Government Marketplace, holds ISO 27001 certification, and has local teams in Wellington and Auckland.
Technology that supports governance in the grant management processes
Good policy and sound decisions still matter. Klevr Grants is designed to help agencies implement and evidence good grant management practice within their own governance framework. The Auditor General’s guidance remains the reference point for the expectations on your agency.
If you’d like to see how Klevr Grants works, book a demo. We can walk you through the full audit trail for a single application (from submission to final report) so you can see exactly how accountability, transparency and evidence come together in one place.