Funding

In Landscape, funding is used to track where you obtain funds from to acquire a property or perform work. Landscape is able to track 3 different aspects of funding: Sources, Agreements with those sources, and subsequent Disbursals. Funding expectations can also be added to a Project. Only disbursals (which can be tied to funding sources or agreements) are tied directly to portfolio records. This funding structure makes it easy to see how much money you've received from a single funding source over time and towards which projects.

You can easily create a new funding source and view your existing ones by clicking on Funding tab from the dashboard.

Funding Source

A funding source can be thought of as a pot of money that you rely on regularly. So, for example, a land trust may track 'Department of Fish & Game' as a funding source, and 'Internal Acquisition Fund' as another. An individual donor should not be represented as a funding source, as Landscape is not intended for donor tracking. Instead, you may want to track 'Private Donations' as a source, or bundle that into your 'Internal Acquisition Fund' source, depending on your reporting needs.

You can create a Funding Source from the main 'Funding' tab, or from the Funding tab of a Project.

Once you create a source, you can add one or multiple contacts to it. The Funding Source entry will also display all Funding Agreements and associated Funding Disbursals. You can add and delete agreements and disbursals from this location as well.

The Funding tab, with the information for a specific source shown on the right.

Funding Agreement

A funding source agreement is an agreement (formal or informal) for an amount of money with a source. This may be an agreement with a funder to fund a particular protection project, or it may be an agreement to provide a certain amount of money for applying towards any number of projects.

Funding Agreements have many additional fields for tracking information specific to that agreement. After you've created an agreement, you can navigate to that agreement to see and edit those additional details.

Type is a field that exists for organizations who regularly provide funds to other organizations. It allows you to specify whether this money is set aside for you ('internal') or for a partner ('partner'). It can be ignored if you only ever deal with one type.

Identifier allows you to capture the ID number of the grant.

Source specifies which Funding Source the agreement is tied to.

Amount is the total amount of the agreement.

Match Amount Required is where you can enter the match amount required by the agreement. Note that if this money is not added automatically as 'expected funding' in a Project, and so depending on how you are tracking funding, you may need to create or incorporate this amount into a separate Funding expectation entry.

Team Lead allows you to specify which staff member is in charge of this agreement.

Applied On, Approved On, Executed On, and Ends On are all date fields which allow you to capture those respective values.

Active allows you to quickly filter out inactive agreements from the Funding page.

'Use Allocation'

This feature allows you to portion out agreements. For example, you could designate X amount as for the purchase of the property, and Y amount as for transactional costs. Additional allocation types can be added via Settings > List Items > Funding (must be an administrator to access settings).

If you toggle this setting on, then the 'Amount' field will disappear from the agreement and will be replaced with the 'Amount Allocations' table. The total amount of the agreement is then the sum of these allocations.

When you add a disbursal to the agreement, you can specify which specific allocation amount it is from from the disbursal editor:

Funding Disbursals

A funding disbursal is a placeholder for actual money that is going to change hands. It captures how much money actually changed hands, when, and for what. Disbursals can be tied to properties or to work within properties.

It is not necessary to have an agreement to create a disbursal - you can simply create a disbursal straight from the source if there's no reason to track additional agreement details.

Funding disbursals can be added from many different contexts. They can be added to work items, or to funding agreements. They can also be added from the 'Funding' tab of a Project, or from the 'All Funding' view of a Portfolio Record (as described in this article). This final method is the easiest and quickest way to note which organizations provided how much funding for the purchase of a Property.

Funding Examples

Here are a few examples of how you might use funding in Landscape:

You create a funding source for 'Department of Fish and Game'. From this source you create an agreement for a grant you received or expect to receive from them for $70,000 for the protection of a particular property. You enter the details of that grant in the agreement details. Finally, you create a disbursal for $69,532.22 (the actual amount you received) in the property record when the money is disbursed. In the future if you receive further grants, you can simply add them as new agreements to the existing source.
You are made aware of a funding source to protect land in your watershed to enhance climate change resilience. You create a funding source for the 'Mill River Watershed Resilience Grant'. There are a certain amount of funds available in FY2024. You create an agreement called 'MRWRG FY2024' and give it an amount of $200,000. From that agreement, you apply one disbursal of $78,999 to Property A, and one for $113,788 to Property B.
Your organization has a certain amount set aside for property stewardship at the beginning of every year. You use a source of 'Internal Funding' to track these funds, and create an agreement called 'FY2024 Property Stewardship Fund' for $23,000. When site work is performed on these sites, you log the individual disbursals within the work items that describe this site work (likely site visits with a type of 'Site Work'). The agreement details can then show you how much has been disbursed and towards what projects over the course of the year.

When to track something as a source vs. an agreement

This depends on how you're used to tracking these items and how you wish to report out on them. Typically a source is the biggest bucket you can define without losing details in the subsequent data or making things too complex. For example, 'Government' would not make a good source to track because it's too broad - your agreements would then need to define the government entity, and then there would be no room left to describe the agreements themselves. Being too specific in defining a source can also be detrimental in making things easy to report later on. Also consider your own regular reporting requirements when defining these buckets.

Funding vs. Budgets vs. Expenses

Funding is where you expect to receive money from (source), how much you expect (optional - agreement), and how much was eventually received and towards what(disbursal). - "We expect to receive $45000 from the Department of Fish and Game. We got $44999 and put it towards the purchase of a property"

Budgets (tracked within projects) are for tracking how much money you expect to spend and on what. - "We're going to spend $60,000 to purchase the actual property, and $5,600 on associated costs."

Expenses are how much money you actually spent, when, and on what. "We spent $49,000 on the actual purchase price, and $4,300 on associated costs."

Projects allow you to see all of this information in one interface so you can see how this all adds up.