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Board Governance and Grant Disbursements, End to End

Board meetings, resolutions, a conflict-of-interest register, and a grant disbursement that cannot be approved past a sanctions hit or a fund restriction.

FT
Falaah Team
· · 6 min read
Board Governance and Grant Disbursements, End to End

Two things decide whether a grantmaker’s paperwork survives a sharp question: whether the board’s decisions are on the record, and whether the money that moved was allowed to move. Both are now end to end in Muin.

The board’s record

Board governance in Muin is four screens, and they are built around one idea: the record should be a by-product of the meeting, not a separate job afterwards.

Meetings. Schedule one with a title, date, time, location, meeting type (regular, special, annual or emergency), a virtual link and an agenda.

Resolutions. Record each resolution with its number, title, description, the meeting it belongs to, who proposed it and who seconded it. Then record the vote: the result, and the votes for, against and abstaining.

Minutes. Press Compile Minutes and Muin builds the minutes from that meeting’s recorded resolutions, renders a branded PDF, and stores it on the meeting. The order matters: record the resolutions first, because the minutes are built from them.

Board packages. A template defines the sections every pack carries, so the pack your board gets in March has the same shape as the one in June.

One deliberate limitation, stated rather than hidden: a vote tally is stored as you type it. Muin does not reconcile the counts against the attendee list or against the result you chose, and quorum is recorded on the meeting rather than calculated. Those are judgements a secretary makes, and a system that guessed at them would be worse than one that asks.

The conflict-of-interest register

Form 990 Part VI line 12 asks the organization to state that it monitors compliance with its conflict-of-interest policy annually. That is a yes-or-no question with an evidence problem behind it, so the register is read from the Form 990 workspace rather than hunted for in a menu.

It answers one question per director: have they filed this year’s disclosure, and did they declare a conflict?

Four tiles carry the shape of it: filed for the fiscal year, still outstanding, signed and clear, recused. The table shows each director’s role, their disclosure state (not filed, filed, or recused), whether a conflict was declared, and the date it was filed.

The detail worth pointing at is the conflict column. It is three-state. Declared, None declared, or a dash when the question has not been answered at all. Rendering an unanswered question as “no conflict” is exactly how an unfiled disclosure reads as a clean one, and the register refuses to do it.

When directors are outstanding, one action nudges them all, and the result is reported honestly rather than optimistically. “Reminded 4 directors.” “2 reminders sent; 1 could not be delivered.” “Everyone outstanding has already been reminded.” “Every director has already filed: nobody to remind.” A run that sent nothing is not a success, and it does not get a green toast.

The register holds state, not text. It records that a conflict was declared, never what the conflict was.

A grant disbursement, and the things that should stop it

A disbursement moves through pending, recommended, under review, approved, award letter sent, awaiting payment, disbursed and completed, with declined and payment failed as the other outcomes.

Approval is where the controls live. Three gates run, in order:

  1. Sanctions screening against the OFAC SDN list. A match blocks the approval and the block cannot be overridden. If the list could not be refreshed, that is also a block. An unscreened grantee is not a cleared one, and treating a failed check as a pass is the kind of quiet default that makes every other green meaningless.
  2. Zakat eligibility. A zakat fund may only be disbursed to a zakat-eligible program. No override clears it.
  3. Fund spending rules. Allowed expense types, a spending limit per category, a salary cap, and for zakat funds an admin cost cap defaulting to 20%. These are overridable, but only with a stated reason, recorded against the approval. At 90% of a limit you get a warning instead of a block, so you see it coming.

And maker-checker throughout: the person who created a disbursement cannot approve it. Some governance settings add a second signer, which routes the first approval to under review and requires a different person to finish it.

Payment adds two more. Separation of duties can require that the approver is not the payer, and a single-operator setup requires a note explaining why the same person did both. Then the bank gate, for automated payments only: no bank account linked, verification failed, or not yet approved by an administrator. Wire and check payments skip it, because there is nothing to verify.

The grantee’s side of that bank gate

Grantees link their own bank account. You never type their account details in.

They open Bank Account in the grantee portal, connect their bank or enter the account manually, and tick two attestation checkboxes. The submission is refused outright if either is unticked. The badge then reads Pending Approval until someone with grant disbursement permissions approves it. If it is rejected, the grantee sees that, with a prompt to link a new one.

Two gates have to clear before ACH money moves: the account has to be verified, and a human has to have approved it. An approved grant will not pay out to an unapproved account, which is the behavior you want the first time somebody emails you new bank details.

Outcomes, so the grant means something afterwards

Metrics are defined per grant program: a name, a description, a target value and a unit such as people, dollars or hours. Reports are submitted against a metric with an actual value, a period and notes, and they accumulate so you can compare across periods.

Define them at the program level from the start. Every grant under that program then collects the same data, which is the only thing that makes the comparison worth running.

Where to start