How a community food relief charity cut its quarterly grant report from a week to about a day

A week lost every quarter

We work with a community food relief charity with two paid staff and about thirty volunteers. Its main funder asks for a report every quarter, covering how many meals the charity served and how many households it helped.

The numbers lived in three different volunteer spreadsheets, one for each site, and each site kept its sheet a little differently. So every quarter the coordinator spent close to a week pulling the three together, adding them up, and copying the totals into the funder’s form. That was a week away from volunteers, suppliers, and the people the charity is there for.

What we set up

First we gave the charity one home for its data (the industry calls it a data lake), in a plain form that suits a team this size. The three Google Sheets now feed one summary sheet, with the same columns and the same meaning for a meal and a household at every site.

Then we set up an AI helper (the industry calls it an agent) that reads the summary each quarter, adds up the meals served and the households helped, and puts the totals into the funder’s report template in Google Docs. The coordinator checks every number against the source sheets before the report goes out.

What didn’t work the first time

We also asked the AI helper to write the short stories about the people the charity helps, because the funder asks for a few in each report. The drafts read fine, but the staff wanted to tell those stories in their own words. They know the people. So now the AI helper only does the numbers.

What changed, and what still needs a person

The first full draft of the quarterly report now takes the coordinator about a day, against close to a week in each of the four quarters before. That’s the coordinator’s own estimate for the first two quarters since launch.

The coordinator still checks every total, and the staff still write the stories. One volunteer site still logs meals on paper, so someone types those totals in by hand before the AI helper runs.

Where this fits

This is one of our reports that write themselves. It works because the funder asks the same questions every quarter and the answers already sit in the charity’s own sheets. If your team spends weeks on reporting, get your AI Starter Plan and tell it where the time goes.