Awards submission management: How to organise, track and act on entries at scale

The moment has finally come! Your awards program is now open for entries, and submissions are already beginning to stack up! Isn’t it thrilling to see so many entrants interested and engaged in your awards opportunity? 

Twenty-five entries. Then fifty. One hundred. Two hundred? As entries pile in, you suddenly realise: building the form, collecting the entries—that was only half the job. Now comes the real work; it’s time to start managing your submissions! 

Whether you have twenty, two hundred or two thousand submissions, you’ll need to organise, track and act on entries at scale. 

And, we’re here to help. Awards submission is our bread and butter at Award Force. In 2025 alone, the platform processed more than 650,000 submitted entries. It’s what our software is designed to support. 

Awards management software for managing entries

Most awards programs invest significant effort in building the entry experience: clear forms, helpful guidance, well-timed reminders. But sometimes there is less thought put into what happens on the backend when those entries arrive.

Without a structured approach, even a mid-sized program can become unmanageable fast. Entries pile up across categories. Status is tracked in a spreadsheet that quickly falls out of date. Support emails pour in asking whether submissions were received. A judge complains that an entry is incomplete. The program manager is copied on everything and is responsible for nothing being missed.

The problem isn’t necessarily the volume of entries but rather the absence of a system for managing them. That’s where awards submission management software comes in.

“Award Force helps me efficiently track the progress of our nominees, from considering to acceptance, streamlining the whole awards process,” said Elizabeth Rogers, who manages a corporate leadership awards program. “I appreciate the organizational capabilities of the platform, specifically how acceptance forms are categorized by ‘in progress’ and ‘submitted’ status, facilitating easy monitoring of nominee progress.”

Start with visibility: filtering and sorting your entry pool

The first task is to get a clear view of what you’re working with. A good entry management interface lets you filter submissions by category, status, entry date, entrant, tag, completion level and more, so you can instantly surface the subset of entries that need your attention right now.

In Award Force, the dashboard gives program managers a real-time view of their full submission pool. You can filter by round, category or custom field, and sort by date submitted, entrant name or entry ID. Rather than scrolling through a list of hundreds of entries, you can work with a focused, relevant subset.

This matters more than it might seem. The ability to quickly answer “How many entries do we have from this region?” or “Which submissions came in after the extended deadline?” without manual counting or exporting data is a genuine time-saver.

In Award Force, you can also filter and sort entries, and then save your views for you and your team. 

Tag, organise, then action

Filters work on fields that already exist in your data. Tags let you add your own layer of organisation on top.

In a well-run submission management workflow, tags serve as a flexible shorthand. You might tag entries that need a second look before they go to judging, entries from first-time entrants, entries that have been flagged for an eligibility query, or entries that have strong supporting material worth highlighting to the judging panel. 

You define your own tags, so they can reflect any distinctions that matter to you and your team in your program’s specific context.

In Award Force, tags can be applied individually or in bulk, and entries can be filtered by tag. This means you can build and work through custom queues: pull up everything tagged “needs review”, action those entries, remove the tag, move on.

Track status, and know where every entry stands

At any point in your program, you should be able to answer: which entries are complete and ready for judging? Which are still in progress? Which have been flagged for resubmission? Which have been withdrawn?

Without dedicated submission management software, this usually means a status column in a spreadsheet — which quickly becomes inaccurate as entries move, entrants update their submissions, and decisions get made without anyone updating the master document.

In Award Force, entry status is managed within the platform and updates in real time. Entries move through defined stages such as in progress, submitted, under review, approved, declined, and so on, and each status change can trigger automated notifications to the entrant. 

This removes a significant source of manual email-writing for program managers and gives entrants confidence that their submission has been received and acted on.

When you’re managing award submissions at scale, status visibility is useful for the whole team. Multiple administrators can see the same entry view, work from the same status and avoid duplicating effort or sending conflicting communications. 

Request re-submission, without chaos

Incomplete or non-compliant entries are a fact of life in any awards program. The question is how you handle them.

A resubmission request where you ask an entrant to update or complete their submission sounds simple enough, but it can create confusion. Entrants aren’t sure what’s needed. They email to ask. They resubmit with a different version attached. The program manager loses track of which entries are still waiting for updates.

Best practice for managing award submissions and evaluations online includes a structured resubmission workflow: a clear communication that specifies exactly what’s missing or required, a deadline for the resubmission, and a mechanism for the entrant to update their entry directly in the platform.

In Award Force, Review Flow enables program managers to request specific changes to a submission and allow the entrant to make those changes within the platform, without reopening the full entry window. The entry returns to the manager’s queue once it’s been updated, so nothing falls through the gaps. This keeps the resubmission process visible, auditable and contained.

Make bulk actions: do more with less effort

When you’re managing hundreds of entries, doing things one at a time quickly becomes unsustainable. Bulk actions are one of the most underrated tools in an awards submission management workflow.

The ability to select a group of entries, such as all submissions in a particular category that have been marked as complete, and apply an action to all of them at once saves significant time. 

Common bulk actions include: moving entries to the next round, assigning a group of entries to a judging panel, sending a batch email to all entrants in a particular status, applying or removing tags, or changing entry status.

Award Force supports bulk actions across the entry management interface. Program managers can select entries using filters, apply actions to the whole selection, and move on, without having to open each entry individually or switch between tabs.

This is when you can genuinely feel the operational efficiency of purpose-built awards submission management software. Tasks that would take an afternoon with a spreadsheet take minutes with bulk action tools.

Manage multi-lingual award submissions

For programs that accept entries from multiple countries, submission management can carry additional complexity. Entrants may be submitting in different languages, working across time zones, or attaching documents in formats that vary by region. Payment may need to be processed in multiple currencies.

International award submission management software needs to handle these variables without creating extra manual work for the program manager. In Award Force, multi-language support means the platform interface can be presented to entrants in their preferred language, while the program manager sees everything in a single unified view. Currency and payment gateway configuration can accommodate international entrants without requiring separate workflows.

For programs that run across regions or jurisdictions, the ability to manage award submissions centrally with regional variation built into the platform can create significant time and cost savings. 

Avoid the scramble with a well-run awards management system

The difference between programs that run smoothly and those that don’t comes down to the system that a team uses to manage their awards.

Purpose-built awards submission management software like Award Force gives program managers the tools they need to move from reactive to proactive: filtering and tagging entries to create structure, tracking status to maintain visibility, handling resubmissions without losing track, and using bulk actions to move at scale.

Learn more about Award Force by watching a demo today.