Federal fiscal and program monitoring
Every review on one table.
GrantMesa is the monitoring workspace for state education agencies and the school systems they oversee. Document requests, submissions, staff review, generated correspondence, and corrective actions stay connected to a single auditable record, from selection to closure.
Mesa is Spanish for table. The name is the whole idea: one surface where the agency and the school system work from the same documents.
- Built for
- Pass-through agencies monitoring federal subawards
- Participants
- 400+ school systems per year: districts, charters, ESCs, IHEs, nonprofits
- Review types
- Fiscal and programmatic (ESSA), each on its own protocol
- Internal roles
- Reviewers, supervisors, corrective-action staff, administrators
- Hosting
- Google Cloud, Texas region
- Certification
- Seeking TX-RAMP
The problem
Built for agencies that have more reviews than reviewers.
Monitoring counts keep rising while staffing stays flat. When the cycle runs on email, shared drives, and spreadsheets, the routine work of chasing documents, formatting letters, and tracking due dates crowds out the judgment the job actually requires.
GrantMesa automates the routine parts and keeps every decision attached to its evidence, so reviewers can see what is outstanding, supervisors can see what is waiting on them, and school systems can see exactly what was asked, what they sent, and what happens next. Agencies get more reviews completed per cycle, results issued sooner, and a record that is ready for audit without a scramble.
The workflow
Fiscal and programmatic reviews, on the same platform.
Each review type is configured to its own protocol, indicators, and correspondence, and both move through the same five stages.
- 1
Select
Open a monitoring cycle. Choose subrecipients by risk level and federal program, and assign the indicators the review will cover.
- 2
Request & collect
Issue evidence requests with due dates. School systems upload through their portal; staff see complete, missing, and overdue at a glance.
- 3
Review & determine
Route submissions to assigned reviewers. Send follow-up inquiries, record determinations, and move items through supervisory approval.
- 4
Issue
Generate monitoring letters, findings, determinations, and non-compliance notices from configurable templates. Draft, reviewed, and issued versions are kept apart.
- 5
Correct & close
Track each corrective action with its owner, due date, evidence, and escalations. Closure records the basis for the decision and who made it.
Fiscal monitoring
Expenditure documentation, allowability, procurement, time and effort, inventory, and the other fiscal indicators your protocol defines. Staff pull financial data from existing systems; GrantMesa organizes the evidence and the determinations.
Programmatic monitoring
ESSA program requirements, grant conditions, and performance goals. Evidence checklists, reviewer determinations, and correspondence are configured per program.
Findings from either track flow into one corrective-action queue, so the staff responsible for resolution work from a single list with consistent deadlines and escalation.
What one review record holds
Every item below is linked to the review it belongs to, and every change to it is written to the audit trail.
Our approach
From evidence to resolution.
GrantMesa is designed to help reviewers answer five practical questions: what is missing, what can be reused, what needs another look, who owns the next step, and what shows the issue is resolved.
- Find evidence gaps
- Check each submission against the review's indicators. Surface missing periods, conflicting records, and unsupported assertions, with links to the exact source and a clear place for reviewer judgment.
- Reuse the evidence that applies
- Connect an existing document to the requests it can support. Keep the applicable period, version, permissions, and each review's decision together, so the next reviewer has the context behind the record.
- Rehearse the monitoring review
- Work through likely follow-up questions before submission. Identify weak support, prioritize corrections, and organize an indexed evidence package that traces each answer to its source.
- Keep requests moving
- Coordinate email follow-ups around the specific missing item, its owner, and the next due date. Connect each response to its request and close the follow-up when the evidence arrives.
- Verify the corrective action
- Connect the finding to the changed practice, evidence of implementation, and follow-up checks. Give the responsible reviewer a documented basis for deciding whether the issue is resolved.
Capabilities
What the platform does.
Organized the way monitoring requirements are usually written, so it is easy to check against your own list.
- Document intake & management
- Secure upload of Word, Excel, and PDF files with validation and malware scanning. Version history, retention rules, full-text retrieval, and organization-scoped visibility. School systems see what was requested, what was submitted, and what is overdue.
- Review workflows
- Assignment, analysis, follow-up inquiries, routing, supervisory approval, and response. Statuses, deadlines, and escalation rules are configured by your administrators, not hard-coded.
- Generated correspondence
- Fiscal and programmatic monitoring letters, findings, determinations, non-compliance notifications, and corrective-action correspondence, produced from configurable templates and populated from the case record. Issuance follows your approval workflow and writes an audit event.
- Corrective-action tracking
- Each action links the finding, required action, responsible organization and person, due date, supporting evidence, communications, escalation, and resolution. Due dates and status are visible to both the agency and the school system.
- Access & roles
- Role-based permissions for internal staff, with cross-program visibility where authorized. External users are restricted to their own school system or organization, enforced at the application boundary and covered by tests. Single sign-on ready.
- Reporting & audit trail
- Configurable dashboards, search and filter across reviews and documents, and export to CSV, Excel, and PDF. The audit trail records user activity, submissions, workflow actions, approvals, status changes, and every system-generated communication.
- Configuration
- Workflows, business rules, forms, templates, notifications, and correspondence are configured to your published protocols by your administrators. A regulatory change is a configuration change, not a development project.
- Historical migration
- Import reviews, findings, determinations, supporting documents, corrective actions, statuses, and correspondence from TeamMate+ Audit, spreadsheets, and other legacy sources. Relationships and source identifiers are preserved and record counts are reconciled before cutover.
- Training & documentation
- Administrator training, recorded walkthroughs, a hands-on sandbox environment, and train-the-trainer materials so your team can onboard users and school systems independently. User guides, admin documentation, and release notes ship with the product.
- Security & accessibility
- Hosted on Google Cloud in Texas. Encryption in transit and at rest, multi-factor authentication, least-privilege access, and dependency scanning. WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility and your agency's branding. Seeking TX-RAMP certification.
Implementation
Configured to your protocols, validated with your staff.
Requirements validation
We work through your fiscal and programmatic protocols with your subject-matter experts and document the current and proposed workflows before configuring anything.
Configuration & migration
Roles, workflows, templates, and notifications are configured to the validated requirements. Historical data is mapped, loaded into a test environment, reconciled, and rehearsed before cutover.
Acceptance testing
Your staff test real scenarios in a sandbox. Nothing goes live until the workflows, generated documents, reports, and access controls perform as designed.
Training & go-live
Administrator training, recorded walkthroughs, and train-the-trainer materials. After launch: standard updates, documentation, and direct access to the engineers who built it.
Company
Built in Texas by Coding Cowboys.
GrantMesa is developed by Coding Cowboys LLC of Denton, Texas. The same team designed and built CoPilot Data, an education data platform that Texas schools have used for more than eight years, and has been making technology for schools for over a decade.
We know how districts, charters, and education service centers actually work, we treat student and financial data with the care it requires, and we keep client data hosted in Texas. When you call, you reach the people writing the software.
I taught in Texas schools before I ever wrote software for them, and I have watched good people lose whole weeks to monitoring paperwork that a decent system should carry for them. We are building GrantMesa to be that system: configured to the agency's own protocols, clear about what is automated and what still needs a reviewer's judgment, and hosted here in Texas. If you run a monitoring program, I would like to walk through your cycle with you.
- Company
- Coding Cowboys LLC
- Location
- 608 E Hickory St, Suite 128, Denton, TX 76205
- UEI
- HYPNGP9NDFL9
- NAICS
- 541511 · 541512
Request a walkthrough
See it against your own monitoring protocol.
Bring a real review cycle. We will walk through it end to end and show you where the time goes.