Last verified

In detail

Every claim in a grant database decays. Deadlines move, programs close, amounts change between cycles, and a listing that was accurate when written becomes wrong without anything visibly happening to it. A verification date is what separates a live record from an archived one.

It is stored on every record and cannot be empty: a record that has never been verified is not allowed to exist. That constraint is the physical form of the product’s first commitment, rather than a reporting nicety.

It is also published in aggregate, including when the number is unflattering. A freshness figure that only appears when it looks good is not evidence.

Against a page update date

A "last updated" stamp on an article says someone reviewed a page. A verification date says this record’s fields were compared against the source and still match. They answer different questions at different granularity — one covers a document, the other covers a deadline you are about to plan around. A failed check does not silently change a record either: a source that cannot be reached is not evidence that a program closed.

How GrantTrove stores it

• The field is required on every record, and the verification method is stored alongside it so you can see how the check was made.
• Aggregate freshness is published on the methodology page with the period it was computed over, whatever the number says.
• Repeated failures to reach a source do not change a record’s status on their own, and a broad failure across one feed suspends changes rather than marking its records closed.

Common questions