Built for sponsored programs teams who seek automation
A Microsoft 365 workflow for interim reports and closeouts, plus Power BI dashboards for pre-award and post-award. On the tenant your campus already runs.
Where interim reports and closeouts go sideways
Pre-award and compliance run on their own systems. Post-award, in most offices, still runs on spreadsheets, shared drives, and email. The work gets done. It just gets done manually and inconsistently. And in both, the numbers leadership asks for get rebuilt by hand every quarter.
Financial reports have a variety of formats. Each one pulls numbers from the ledger, gets routed to a reviewer, who then approves and submits it by the deadline. Most teams stitch this together without a workflow underneath it.
Ensuring that your F&A recovery is accurate can be time and labor consuming if rates change mid-project, or exceptions are not properly excluded or included. The variance is rarely visible until someone goes looking.
A year after a project ends, the question of who reviewed what, what got reclassified, and why a cost was disallowed turns into a search across inboxes and shared drives. The answer exists. It's just not in one place.
What it looks like in practice
Four views of how Quorum handles interim reporting and closeouts once it's deployed.
Pre-award and post-award, in one view
Quorum designs the semantic model. Quorum builds the report pages and deploys them in Power BI, on the tenant your campus already runs. Pre-award pipeline, award portfolio, and salary coverage, built on extracts from the systems your office already reports from, scoped during Discovery. The workflow keeps the record clean. The dashboards show what the record says.
All figures shown are synthetic sample data. These are not screenshots of any institution's reports.
The numbers behind the manual work
Across knowledge workers globally, automation has measurable effects on time, accuracy, and satisfaction. The research is recent, the samples are large, and the numbers point in one direction.
90%
of workers using automation at work say it saves them time
Microsoft & LinkedIn, 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report
39%
of workers report more accurate work outputs after adopting automation
UiPath 2024 Global Knowledge Worker Survey
81%
higher job satisfaction among daily automation users versus non-users
Slack Workforce Index, June 2025
Who's building this
Quorum is a one-person practice. The person on the Discovery call is the same person who designs and runs the build.
Ady Villegas-Estrada is currently an Associate Director in the Office of Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as an Authorized Organizational Representative across a roughly $400M sponsored portfolio. Before Penn, he spent close to two decades at Weill Cornell Medicine. During his run at Cornell Radiology, NIH funding grew 422% and the department moved into the national top five for radiology research.
He chaired the NCURA Region II Annual Meeting in 2023. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Notre Dame, is a Certified Research Administrator, and has co-authored work in JAMA Network Open and Academic Medicine.
Why he's building Quorum: most interim reporting and financial closeouts still happen by hand, even at well-resourced offices. Post-Award Administrators reconstruct fund history from spreadsheets and route reports through email. The tools to automate the routine parts of that work sit inside Microsoft 365, which most institutions already license. Quorum exists to build them.
What working with Quorum actually means
What buyers usually want to know before the Discovery call.
Quorum builds interim reporting and financial closeout workflows for sponsored programs offices on Microsoft 365: SharePoint, Teams, Power Automate, Power BI, the tenant your campus already runs. Quorum also designs and builds the Power BI reporting on top, for pre-award submissions as well as the award portfolio. We read your expenditure ledger, and where the reporting calls for it, extracts from your ERA system and payroll. We don't replace your ERA system. What comes out the other side is a consistent, automated, timestamped record of every report and financial closeout, including who reviewed it and what was submitted.
We discover before we design. The first four to six weeks are a Discovery engagement. We walk your reporting and financial closeouts end-to-end, name the steps your team actually performs, and surface the processes that make your office different. Build follows a written architecture document.
Quorum runs inside your institution's existing Microsoft 365 tenant. There's no new vendor to onboard, no new sign-in for your team, no new system for IT to secure. Your data stays where it already lives, under the controls your IT team already manages.
Eight to twelve weeks from Build kickoff to production on the Discovery-approved architecture. Discovery comes first and is scoped separately. Inside Build the sequence is Architecture, then Build, then UAT and cutover. Your Post-Award Administrators run UAT against real reports and closeouts before go-live. The cutover plan is delivered before Build starts.
You own what gets built. The Microsoft 365 artifacts — SharePoint sites, Power Automate flows, Power BI reports — sit in your tenant under your administrators. The architecture document is yours. There is no Quorum platform license and no per-seat fee. If you stop working with us tomorrow, your team keeps everything.
How engagements are shaped
Every engagement starts with Discovery, scoped to what you are building. Build is implementation against the Discovery-approved architecture. Dashboards run inside Build or as a standalone engagement. Managed Services keeps the workflow current after go-live.
A structured walk through your interim reporting and financial closeouts end-to-end. The output is a written architecture document: the steps your team performs, the data sources and federal forms involved, and the integration points with your ERA system and ledger. For a dashboards engagement, Discovery is shorter and covers the measures, the data sources, and how your office counts them. The document is yours whether you continue to Build or not.
Implementation against the Discovery architecture. SharePoint sites, Power Automate flows, Power BI reports, and the reconciliation logic deployed in your Microsoft 365 tenant. UAT against real reports and closeouts before cutover. Your Post-Award Administrators are in the build from week one.
Power BI design and implementation, not advice about what to build. The semantic model, the measures, and the report pages, built on the data the workflow produces or on the sources your office reports from today. Sample reports, built on synthetic data, cover the pre-award pipeline, the award portfolio, and salary coverage. Your team keeps the model and the report files, with a handover session before close.
Post-go-live ownership of the workflow alongside your team. Federal-form updates, sponsor-format changes, reporting refinements, and second-tier support for your Post-Award Administrators. Sized to your reporting volume and financial closeout cycle, not a per-seat license.
Next step
Bring the part of interim reporting or financial closeouts you're trying to fix. We'll tell you whether Quorum is the right fit before either side writes a statement of work.
Follow-up within 1–2 business days. We'll send you a tailored Discovery scope.