stepbase

By team

Four hundred applications arrive in nine days

Admissions and grant rounds are not steady work. They are a spike, a panel of reviewers who all score differently, and a decision you have to be able to defend a year later. stepbase gives the round one path every application travels, and keeps the scores that decided it.

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The round runs on a spreadsheet and a shared drive

Applications come in by email or a form. Someone downloads the attachments into folders. A scoring sheet goes out to five faculty reviewers and four of them return it, one of them in a different format. The committee meets with a tab that took a day to assemble. Then an applicant asks in March what happened to their file in January, and the honest answer is that it depends who you ask.

Today

  • Applications land as email attachments, renamed by hand into a drive folder
  • Nobody is sure which files are complete until someone opens all of them
  • Reviewer scores come back as separate spreadsheets, on different scales
  • Chasing the fifth reviewer is a person's job for a week
  • The committee sheet is assembled manually the night before the meeting
  • Applicants email the office to ask where their file sits

On stepbase

  • Applicants open their own file from one link the office can email or print as a QR code
  • A screening step confirms the file is complete before it reaches a reviewer
  • Faculty score the same fields on the same scale, without seeing each other's marks
  • The round waits for the number of reviewers you set, and flags what is overdue
  • Aggregated scores route the file: shortlist, waitlist, or decline, by rule
  • Every score, comment, and decision is timestamped against the person who made it

How it works

  1. 1

    Open the round with a public application form

    Share one link. Applicants submit details, statements, transcripts, and uploads without creating an account. Require an email if you want each submission tied to a person.

  2. 2

    Check the file is complete before the panel sees it

    The office confirms the file is complete and eligible. Anything that fails closes with the reason recorded, so it never reaches the panel.

  3. 3

    Score against one rubric, in parallel

    A multi-review step sends the same scorecard to every reviewer, each filling it in independently. Set the panel size the round actually needs: all five faculty on a scholarship, the first three back on a large intake.

  4. 4

    Route on the scores, not on who has time

    A condition block reads the totals and sends high scorers to the committee, mid-band to a waitlist, and the rest to a decline. The committee only reads what is worth reading.

  5. 5

    Record the decision so it holds up later

    Offer, waitlist, or decline is a recorded outcome with a required rationale. A year on, the trail still shows who scored what, when, and what moved the file.

Start from a template

Every template is fully editable: change the stages, forms, and routing to match how you work.

Admissions

Applications screened by the office that owns the programme, scored by every reviewer against one rubric, and decided by the director, on a board and a dashboard the whole office reads.

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Grant Application

Intake, eligibility checks, reviewer scoring, and committee decisions.

View template

What makes it work

Forms18 field types, conditional logic, public linksWorkflows & approvalsSteps, Rules, Outcomes, deadlines, escalationPages & boardsRecord pages, boards, tiles, public linksAnalytics & auditTiles, charts, cycle time, the audit trail

FAQ

Common questions

No. The first stage is a public link. You can leave it fully anonymous, or require an email so each application is tied to a named applicant.
Reviewer scoring is a form, not a spreadsheet. Every reviewer on the step sees the same rubric fields with the same validation, fills it in independently, and their scores are stored against them by name.
You set how many reviewers have to act before the file moves on: all of them, a specific number, or a percentage. Steps can carry a deadline with a warning ahead of it, and anything that slips shows up flagged rather than quietly stalling.
Yes, and that is usually where the time goes. A condition block on the aggregated score band sends only the shortlist to committee deliberation; the rest close on a waitlist or decline outcome without consuming a meeting.
For any application: the score each reviewer gave, the comments behind those scores, and the committee's recorded decision with its rationale, still readable a year after the round closed.

What process would you turn into an app?

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Start from a template