Using MGS Online

Once you receive your offer of award letter you must formally accept the offer before anything else can happen. To do this you will need to nominate a Finance Authority, who must be a separate person from your Primary Contact and Signatory, and complete the process by the deadline confirmed in your award letter (normally one month from the date of the letter). These are the steps to complete the award acceptance:

• When your award is confirmed, your Signatory will receive an email telling them that the application status has been updated and providing a link to follow to the award letter. The Signatory must check that they are happy with all the information in the letter and the general conditions before completing the expected project start and completion dates and responding to any special conditions that have been set. For grants over £10,000 there will also be an option to request an upfront payment. Once everything has been checked and updated the Signatory must save the changes.
• Your Signatory will then be prompted to provide the name and email address of a Financial Authority for your grant. This must be someone different from the primary contact and the Signatory (not just one of these people using a different email address) and should be someone who has authority within your organisation to commit expenditure, such as your Treasurer.
• Your Signatory then completes their step by filling in their own name and date in the signatory box and saving the changes they’ve made to the form.
• Completing this step will send an email to the Finance Authority, who must follow the link to the award letter, fill in their name and date in the finance authority section and then select submit to complete the process. Please note that system generated emails sometimes go into spam or junk folders, so it is worth checking that your Finance Authority has seen the email, as the acceptance process will not be complete until they have signed and dated the letter.
• Once your Finance Authority has submitted the form, we will complete the award process and you will receive confirmation that this has been done.

Once you have accepted an award you will be able to use MGS Online to track all aspects of the grant process. You can log on to MGS Online at any time but it is important to remember to use the same email address that you used to set up your account – this is how the system recognises you and you won’t be able to access any information from a different email address. 

Once logged on, select ‘Projects’ and this will bring up the ‘My Projects’ page. Select the project you want to look at from the list under ‘Active Projects’ and this will take you to the home page for that grant. From the home page you can see: 

• Your original application – click on the ‘View Application’ button.
• Your award letter – click on the ‘Award Letter’ button.
• Your grant – in the blue box on the right you can see the account balance, which is the remaining grant available to draw down, and the grant percentage, which is the full grant as a percentage of the total cost of your project.
• Files – we will add copies of any email correspondence between us that affects your grant, such as decisions to change the use of funds or extend the project end date.
• Members – these are the people in your organisation who have access to the information about this grant and it shows what role they have. See Updating project contact details if you need to amend this information.
• My Reports – this shows how many reports you are required to submit for this grant and when they are due. See Reporting for more information.
• My Claims – this shows what claims have been paid and made and your current balance. See Making a claim for more information.
• Conditions – this shows any special conditions that were attached to your offer of award and whether they must be met at the time of the award or on completion of the funded project. You can click the links to read the full details. The full standard terms and conditions can be viewed in the award letter. 

There should always be three Members attached to any grant – a primary contact, a signature authority, and a finance contact, that you must ensure you keep current through the life of the project. The first two are added automatically from your application and the finance contact is added when the award is accepted. You can update these at any time by logging on the grant home page in MGS Online, going to the Members section and using the “Change” button to delete old contacts and invite new ones.

Please note that any changes you make will relate only to a specific grant and you must update this information for every live grant you have in progress.

You can also add someone just as a “member” to a specific grant is, for example, you want them to be able to read the application form or see a report, but they don’t have one of the three main roles.