Updating Many Applications at Once
Tick some applications in the list and the bulk action bar appears. From there you can move them all through a status, set or clear a project lead, or export them to a spreadsheet.
Picking your batch
Tick the rows you want. If you tick everything on the page and more applications still match your filter, a banner offers to select all matching, which grabs the whole filtered set rather than just what is on screen.
Changing the filter, the search, the status tab or the grant clears your selection. That is on purpose: it stops you applying an action to a set you are no longer looking at.
Changing status
Pick the new status and write a reason. One reason can cover the whole batch, or you can give each application its own if the circumstances differ.
Applications are processed one at a time, so a batch can partly succeed. You get a count of what worked and what did not rather than an all-or-nothing failure.
Two things it will refuse
It will not approve applications. Moving a batch into an approved status is blocked outright. Approval commits money, so it stays a one-at-a-time decision.
It skips anything that owes a form. If an application's current status has a status-change form attached, it gets skipped and reported as failed. Those forms still have to be completed individually.
Applications you are blocked from as an assessor are skipped too, exactly as they would be one at a time.
The emails are real
This is the part to think about before clicking. A bulk status change is not a quiet database update. For every application that actually changes status:
The status-change email goes out, if that status has a template set to send automatically. Three hundred applications means up to three hundred emails, and you cannot recall them.
Any connected external system is told about the new status.
The change is written into the application's history along with your reason.
So check the template first. It is worth five seconds.
One thing a status change does not do is re-run the assessment. Optible does not re-read anything and no score moves.
Assigning a project lead
Select the applications and pick an assessor, who has to already be on the grant. Leave the assessor blank and it clears the project lead instead.
No emails go out for this one and no external system is notified. It updates the assignment and logs it in each application's history. Grant admins only.
How long it takes
Work is done in batches of 500, and larger selections are split up automatically with a progress bar. The progress count is real, not decorative, so a few thousand applications will visibly take a while.