Research Grant Management Software: Simplify Your Grant Management with AIMS
Designed for universities, research institutions, and academic teams, AIMS streamlines every stage of the grant lifecycle – from discovery and application to compliance, budgeting, and final reporting – so you can focus on impactful research, not administration.
What is AIMS?
AIMS is a complete end-to-end solution that controls every stage of the research grant life cycle, from initial request, through assessment and recommendations, to authorisation, payment, and the subsequent reporting on your KPIs, outcomes, and overall impact.
Built for the Unique Needs of Research Institutions
Managing research grants involves far more than just submitting applications — it requires seamless coordination between researchers, administrative teams, finance offices, and funding bodies. AIMS was developed in close collaboration with leading research institutions to meet these specific challenges.
With AIMS, research organisations can:
Manage the entire grant lifecycle — pre- and post-award
Handle everything from identifying funding calls, creating proposals, securing internal approvals, and submitting applications, all the way through to post-award compliance, financial reporting, and project close-out.
Streamline internal approvals and workflows
Customisable workflows reflect your internal governance processes, helping ensure faster approvals, greater accountability, and fewer bottlenecks.
Enable transparent compliance and audit trails
Track every decision, change, and communication with full transparency. Built-in audit logs and permissions help ensure your organisation is always audit-ready.
Deliver real-time reporting for PIs and research managers
Give principal investigators and research support staff on-demand access to live project data, fund balances, milestones, and KPIs through easy-to-use dashboards.
Features
A single online portal
Give your applicants and administrators a simple one-stop site to apply, manage and report on all research grants. All users, both internal and external, can access your solution wherever they are.
Flexible workflow
Use AIMS to build intuitive workflows. AIMS allows a different workflow to be linked to each research scheme, giving you the flexibility to create the process that works best for each programme.
Easy to build smartforms
Build your own state-of-the-art online forms with bespoke question types, connected to your database. Create multistage applications or conditional questions to manage and drive forms.
Customisable reports
AIMS provides integrated browser-based analytics and reporting, including operational and dashboard reporting, giving you complete control in creating and tracking applications.
Contact management
AIMS is a centralised database that automatically captures, stores, and manages all applicant information. Relationship management is seamlessly integrated into all your grantmaking.
Document management
Our systems provide a secure place to store and manage all proposals, submissions and applications related to your funding schemes or programmes, including attachments.
Managing your KPI data
KPI data can be linked to an application and scheme within AIMS. KPIs are also recorded at an organisational level, allowing you to determine the success of specific measures and time frames.
Access control
Define and segregate who has access to specific functions of the system, and flag conflicts of interest. Access can be defined by user, role, or research programme.
Funding decisions
Facilitate your decision-making processes and manage decision points with the AIMS meetings function. AIMS securely records your funding decisions and associated reference documents.
Payments and finances
Control the entire financial pipeline of a programme – including application amounts, commitments, auto-scheduled payments, budget and fund management.
Project costs and claims
Applicants can add reviewable project costs as part of their application. Payment claims are recorded along with these costs, including submission, tracking, approvals and payments.
Contract management
You can use AIMS to manage your donors and funders’ contracts by setting up customised workflows to capture donor details, donations, and your full contract pipeline.
Accessibility
AIMS meets WCAG 2.1 AA standards and works seamlessly with assistive technologies. It supports all major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Our responsive design ensures an optimal experience across all devices.
User experience
AIMS is simple and intuitive to use, requiring minimal guidance and support to applicants. Your UX can be adapted to reflect your house style and branding. Language is completely configurable.
Security
We have stringent security controls in place to protect the confidentiality and availability of your programmes and data. All data on your system remains private and under your sole control.
Hosting
We provide AIMS to our clients using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for hosting. This gives our clients the benefits of resilient Oracle hosting, improved security monitoring and overall performance.
“We have recently switched to AIMS for our yearly grant calls and required a specific system due to a rather complex collaboration between different research funding organisations. AIMS Software Ltd has certainly delivered on its promises and the use of our new system is saving time throughout our process..”
European Grant Manager, Alzheimer Common European programme
Case Study – ZonMw – The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development
The challenge
ZonMw required a system to upgrade their grant processes significantly. With an increase in the number of grant schemes they run, and a related significant increase in the number of applications they receive, ZonMw set out to find and implement a web-based grant management system for end-to-end management of all grant schemes.
It was key that their grant management system included the administration of the full grant lifecycle to fully automate the relevant processes. This would also allow the standardisation of administration and tracking of these processes, whilst improving efficiency and governance. They wanted a complete off-the-shelf grant management solution that would allow internal and external stakeholders to apply for grants, assess and approve or reject applications, track project progress, and generate reports to analyse overall trends and grant utilisation.
The solution
ZonMw selected AIMS as its grant intelligence system to support both its strategic goals and day-to-day operations. The platform enables the organisation to manage grants efficiently while aligning with broader objectives. AIMS integrates fully with ZonMw’s existing architecture and continues to adapt as their grantmaking needs evolve. As both a product and a partner, AIMS offers ZonMw a scalable, long-term solution built for future growth.
ZonMw uses AIMS to create templated application processes, enabling the organisation to manage hundreds of application schemes with consistency and control. By automating administration and standardising workflows, ZonMw has improved efficiency and strengthened governance.
Integrations
AIMS integrates effortlessly with your existing systems, helping you streamline workflows, reduce duplication, and maintain data accuracy across the entire grants process.
Through our partnership with Elsevier, AIMS integrates with Researchfish to enable seamless and secure reporting of research outputs and impacts. AIMS captures key project and grant data and aligns it directly with Researchfish reporting requirements — reducing duplication, improving accuracy, and helping institutions meet funder obligations with less administrative burden.
AIMS integrates with ValidSign to provide secure, legally binding electronic signatures for grant agreements, contracts, and internal approvals. Users can generate documents in AIMS and sign them digitally through ValidSign, with full audit trails — accelerating workflows, reducing paper use, and supporting remote collaboration.
