Proposals
Documents and tasks
A proposal's documents live in three tabs: Documents tracks the package, Write is where drafts get written, and Review is where they get checked before submission. The budget spreadsheet has its own Budget tab.
Documents
The Documents tab shows every required document as a board, with one column per status: To Do, In Progress, Ready For Review, In Review, and Complete. Switch to the list view to see the same statuses stacked as panels. Drag a document between columns, or use its menu, to change its status, and mark a document Not Needed to set it aside. Search and filter by section, assignee, or due date to find your own work.
Click a document to open its summary in a side panel: its status, due date and owner, what the last review found, its subtasks, the latest discussion, what the funder asks for, and its history. From there you can upload a draft or open it in the editor.
If you manage the proposal, assign each document to a team member, set deadlines, and attach templates, such as a university budget template, so people have a starting point. Some documents and templates arrive already in place, added by your administrators through organization rules. Add Document creates a new one, and Select lets you edit several at once.
Upload drafts
Upload a single file or a whole folder and Atom reads each file and sorts it into the right required document, which you can adjust before it attaches. You can also drop a file straight onto a document on the Review tab. Atom accepts common document, spreadsheet, and slide formats, including PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, LaTeX, and Pages or Keynote.
Spreadsheet attachments in .csv, .tsv, .xlsx, and .xls formats preview as interactive spreadsheets, including multi-sheet workbooks, so you can check a file without downloading it.
Write
The Write tab opens with a search list of the documents to draft, with the ones you opened last at the top. Pick one and it opens in the editor, with the document's requirements in a column on the left. A document with nothing in it yet offers four ways to start: your office's template, an Atom outline written from the solicitation, a blank page, or an upload of a draft you already have.
Review
The Review tab gives each draft a card with one score for how ready it is and its feedback by category: solicitation requirements, formatting, institution policies, and comments. Documents with no draft yet are listed so you can drop a file onto them, and Review All runs the review on every draft that hasn't had one.
Open a draft to work through its feedback in the editor. The review checks it against the requirements and suggests fixes, and the format check covers details like font size and margins. The budget justification is reviewed with the budget, on the Budget tab, where Atom reconciles your spreadsheet against your justification and checks allowability, effort and salary, and the funder's rules.
Reviews are shared with the whole team, so no one reruns the same check. You can also highlight text, leave a comment, and tag a collaborator to revise it, keeping the back-and-forth on Atom.
Your uploads stay secure and private. Atom never uses your documents to train AI models or publish them anywhere.
Run a full proposal review
Once a substantial draft is in, ask Atom for a full review. It mimics a red-team read: it processes every file, reviews anything not yet reviewed, then cross-checks that everything is aligned, for instance that your budget narrative matches your budget spreadsheet. You get an overall score against the grant's review criteria, plus section-by-section strengths, weaknesses with suggested fixes, consistency checks, and formatting flags. The score uses the funder's own scale, so an NIH review shows a rating like 1 to 9 and an NSF review shows a label like Excellent or Very Good.
Treat the AI reviews as a pre-review. Have your team tighten drafts in Atom before they reach your internal read-through, so reviewers see a stronger proposal.
When the package is ready, see collaboration and export.