Use of funds
What the award may actually be spent on. A program can be a perfect fit on subject, geography and organisation type and still be unusable because it will not pay for the thing you need — most often salaries, rent or equipment.
Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.
Also called Allowable costs · Eligible expenses · What the money can pay for
In detail
The exclusions do more work than the inclusions. Capital equipment, general operating support, existing staff salaries, indirect costs and construction are the five that most often turn a promising match into a dead end, and a notice that lists twelve eligible activities may exclude all five in one sentence further down.
Programs express this as a list of eligible activities, a list of unallowable costs, or both, and the two lists rarely partition the space cleanly. We store the categories we can resolve and keep the source’s wording for the rest.
This is the field that separates project funding from operating funding, which is the distinction most small organisations are actually searching on even when they do not phrase it that way.
Against eligibility
Eligibility asks whether you may apply; use of funds asks whether the money is worth applying for. They fail independently and at different moments — eligibility fails at the screen, use of funds fails when you build the budget. A search that filters only on eligibility will hand you programs you qualify for and cannot spend.
How GrantTrove stores it
- Use of funds is stored as its own set of categories rather than folded into the description, so it can be filtered on rather than read for.
- Where a program states restrictions we cannot resolve into a category, the wording is preserved rather than dropped, and the field reads Not stated where nothing was published at all.
Common questions
Why do so many programs refuse to fund salaries?
Because they are designed as project funding rather than operating support. It is a design choice rather than an oversight, and it is stated in the notice — which is why the field is worth filtering on before you read anything else.
Does "general operating support" appear as a category?
Where a program offers it, yes. It is the rarest and most sought-after category in the catalogue, and it is never inferred from a program that simply failed to restrict its spending.
What if a program lists eligible activities but no exclusions?
The record shows what was listed. An absent exclusion list is not permission, and we do not convert one into the other.