‍Across Australia, public sector agencies manage billions of dollars in grant funding every year from simple reimbursements to individuals to complex, multi-year business development programs. Yet for many of these agencies, the systems supporting this work are showing their age.

Legacy grant management platforms can be difficult to maintain, inflexible, and unable to support the evolving needs of grant-making organisations. Many were not designed with today’s security, compliance, or user experience requirements in mind.

This is the gap that Superware Award was built to fill.

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The origins of Award

Award was developed in response to a request from an Australian government department that was struggling with an ageing grants management system. The department’s existing application was well known in the market, widely used but increasingly out of step with modern expectations for flexibility, efficiency, and data security.

By building Award on Microsoft’s Power Platform, Superware was able to offer several key advantages:

• Data security and sovereignty: The system runs within the government agency’s Microsoft tenancy and Australian data centres, ensuring full compliance with government security, governance, and data sovereignty requirements.
  
  
• IRAP-assessed platform: Power Platform has been assessed under the Australian Signals Directorate’s IRAP program, meaning it is approved for handling protected-level information, a critical requirement for many public sector bodies.
  
  
• Configurability: Agencies have full control to tailor their grants management processes, without needing to commission expensive bespoke software development.
  
  

Award is now seeing growing interest across the Australian public sector, as more organisations look to modernise how they manage grant programs.

Supporting all types of grants

Public sector grant-making in Australia is highly diverse and Award was designed from the ground up to support a wide range of programs.

Some programs are simple and recurring. For example, an apprentice might apply once a year for a reimbursement of tools they’ve purchased. These grants are relatively straightforward but require an easy application process, clear records of eligibility, and robust tracking to ensure compliance.

At the other end of the spectrum are complex, long-running grants, often in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, awarded to businesses or organisations to support initiatives like export development or regional infrastructure. These grants involve:

• Multi-stage applications
• Formal agreements and milestones
• Ongoing project reporting
• Verification of deliverables
• Staged funding releases
  
  

Award is designed to handle both ends of this spectrum, from quick, individual applications to detailed, milestone-based project grants.

Empowering grant officers with configurable tools

One of the key innovations in Award is how it simplifies the creation of grant application forms and workflows.

Traditionally, if an agency wanted to launch a new grant program or update an existing one, it often required development work; coding new forms, setting up databases, or manually configuring processes.

With Award, grant officers can handle this themselves, without needing to engage developers. Award's drag-and-drop questionnaire builder allows grants program managers to:

• Build new questionnaires from scratch
• Reuse entire forms or sections from previous programs
• Convert existing PDF forms into structured online forms (a process that typically takes 90 seconds to scan and generate)
  
  

The result is that agencies can launch new grant programs or update existing ones quickly and cost-effectively, ensuring they stay agile in responding to changing government priorities.

Seamless application review and management

Award also streamlines the end-to-end grant lifecycle from application to approval to post-award management.

Once applications are submitted, all applicant information is available to reviewers in a single, intuitive interface. Features include:

• Tracking of all application details and supporting documents
• Notes and tasks assigned to colleagues
• Progression through review and approval workflows
• Automated tracking of milestones and funding disbursements
• Built-in compliance checks
  
  

For complex grants, this means fewer manual processes and greater transparency, both internally and for reporting to auditors and oversight bodies.

Supporting accountability and reporting

Government agencies are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that public funds are being used effectively.

Award provides program-level reporting that helps agencies track:

• The total value of grants awarded
• The economic and social impact of funded projects
• Progress toward program KPIs and strategic objectives
  
  

Dashboards allow grant managers to see how programs are performing at a glance, whether at an individual application level or across entire portfolios.

This supports not only better management of active programs but also evidence-based planning for future initiatives.

Built for the Australian public sector

It’s important to emphasise that Award was purpose-built for Australian public sector agencies. Many international grants management platforms exist, but they are often designed for US or EU markets, with compliance frameworks and terminology that don’t map well to Australian requirements. Or they were built with philanthropic organisations in mind, instead of public sector organisations.

Award is built to reflect:

• Australian government security and data standards
• Local governance and reporting requirements
• The needs of Australian grant officers and public sector workflows
  
  

Because it is built on Microsoft Power Platform, agencies also benefit from:

• Seamless integration with their existing Microsoft environments (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Dynamics, etc.)
• A future-proofed architecture with ongoing Microsoft investment
• Flexible licensing and scaling options to suit agency needs
  

Early momentum in the market

While Award is still in its early market phase, interest from Australian public sector organisations has been strong.

For example:

• A proposal is currently under consideration with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) for a multi-thousand-user deployment.
  
  
• The Construction Industry Training Board in South Australia has also expressed interest in adopting Award for its grant management needs.
  
  

As more agencies move to modern cloud platforms and seek to replace legacy systems, Award offers a compelling option that is secure, flexible, and built for their environment.

Why modernising grant management matters

The stakes in public sector grant-making are high:

• It’s about responsible stewardship of public funds.
• It’s about ensuring transparency and accountability.
• It’s about delivering better outcomes for citizens, businesses, and communities.
  
  

Yet too often, outdated systems hold agencies back creating unnecessary inefficiencies and risks. Award helps agencies move forward: modernising their processes, improving the experience for both applicants and grant officers, and ensuring that every dollar spent can be clearly accounted for and linked to outcomes.

Looking ahead

In an environment where public expectations of government transparency are rising and where regulatory scrutiny continues to increase, modernising grant management should be a priority for any agency managing significant grant portfolios.

Award is designed to support this modernisation journey. For Australian public sector bodies seeking a secure, flexible, and intuitive grant management solution, Award offers a path forward, built on trusted technology and shaped by the needs of Australian agencies.

To learn more about how Award works, visit the Award product page on our website.

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