How much of your work goes to funder reporting vs client work?
trying to get a gut check from other CBO folks because i think we've quietly normalized something insane.
our team runs HRSN/SDoH services and the honest breakdown of a week is roughly 30-40% on compliance documentation. not client work, not program design. documentation. and the maddening part is most of it is duplication: the same client typed into an intake form, then into billing, then into the quarterly funder report, then into the state portal. four times, four chances to fumble a demographic field or drop a referral, and you don't find out you fumbled until an audit.
what gets me is that when HRSN services got funded, the billing codes, quarterly reports, and closed-loop documentation all landed on the same staff with the same hours in the day. new revenue showed up with new admin and zero new capacity. so a win on paper feels like a loss in practice because everyone's doing two jobs now.
for those of you on braided grant + medicaid funding with a small team (say 5-20 staff), how are you actually handling this?
- are you eating the copy-paste marathon and just accepting the lost hours
- did you hire someone specifically for reporting
- did you find a workflow that captures data once so it flows into intake, billing, and the report
i'm mostly curious whether anyone has genuinely cut the duplication or if this is just the tax we all pay for doing the work. would love to hear what's worked and what hasn't.