Each time USAID commits funds, the responsible officer must confirm that a complex set of requirements has been met. These requirements vary by the type of funding action, how the funds will be used, and the specific fiscal year or years included in the action. These are all important requirements that ensure USAID is following legal requirements and direction from Congress. However, the web of requirements can be difficult to follow. To add to the challenge, each operating unit may have its own set of requirements or specific procedures! Through the Program Cycle Mechanism (PCM), Environmental Incentives and our partner Social Solutions International worked with Design to Award (D2A), a cross-Agency working group with representatives from PLR, M/OAA, and GC, to improve the Pre-obligation Checklist. We worked to expand the number of actions covered and include a module for review of statutory requirements. At the same time, we simplified the design and improved the checklist’s aesthetic appeal, resulting in the **Pre-Action, Pre-Obligation, and Activity Checklist Template**.  The key to the success of this optional tool is its adoption by the Program Officers in Missions and other Bureaus. Each operating unit has unique requirements and procedures that must be followed in addition to Agency-wide requirements. Many of these operating units have already developed their own custom tools for this process. We needed to develop a tool that was both easy to use and easy to adapt to entice widespread adoption.  I built the Checklist in Google Sheets, a technology that the USAID workforce is familiar with, and extended the functionality using Google Apps Script to deliver a great user experience. Through repeated rounds of user testing, we refined and simplified the functionality. We hoped to create a Checklist that users found intuitive to use and easy to adapt without ongoing support from the D2A team. The backend includes a simple table with action types as columns and requirements as rows. The Checklist administrator for each operating unit can simply indicate which of the requirements are required or not required by action type. When the checklist user selects an action type, the relevant requirements are dynamically filtered. This greatly reduces the burden by standardizing the process across operating units and avoiding the need to hunt through a multitude of legal documents to collate requirements. Approximately 18,000 funding actions including obligations are undertaken each year at USAID. If the Checklist saves just one and a half hours on average for each action, the total time saved could be as high as 27,000 hours per year. The Pre-Action, Pre-Obligation, and Activity Checklist Template is an example of a tool that both meets an Agency-wide need and supports the adaptation to meet the specific requirements of each operating unit. We believe that this paradigm can serve as an example for reducing the burden of workflows across the Agency.