How an employee-owned finance consultancy made Budgyt the backbone of its practice, rolling it out over a dozen nonprofits & running its own books too
Amy McPherson leads financial management support at Advisors for Change (AFC), an employee-owned firm that supports small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations with financial management services that include budgeting and forecasting.
Most of their clients that need budgeting support arrive in the same place: a budget solution held together by Excel, with no dedicated tool sitting outside the accounting system. Some are fed up and hunting for something better. Some weren’t looking at all. AFC wins over both, and both kinds of organizations end up saying the same thing about Budgyt.
AFC has implemented Budgyt in over a dozen organizations, dedicated one team member to become deeply knowledgeable in Budgyt implementations to support the team, and built its own internal budget and rolling forecasts on it. When AFC recommends Budgyt to a nonprofit, the firm’s credibility is riding on it.
“We see Excel files with multiple versions that often have formula errors when they are opened by too many users.“
Most finance leaders see an Excel budget break once. AFC sees it across client after client, and it usually shows up in one of two ways:
Underneath both is the same structural gap: the accounting system doesn’t do budgets, so the organization falls back to Excel by default. No one picked Excel for the job; it was the only thing already on the desk.
The cost wasn’t only error risk. It was where the hours went. Time spent setting up sheets and error-checking is time not spent on the content of the budget itself, or on building out the scenarios a nonprofit actually needs to plan. For a firm whose product is finance expertise, that’s expertise lost to spreadsheet maintenance.
“We have never found a tool that is so easy to customize for multiple users with different levels of access at Budgyt’s price point.“
Amy found Budgyt online years ago, evaluated other tools, and kept coming back to the same conclusion. For a consultancy deploying the same platform across many organizations, a few things mattered more than anything else:
Onboarding earned its own mention. Amy points to the efficiency and care from the onboarding team, and to one detail that pays off long after go-live: every onboarding meeting is recorded and saved directly in Budgyt, so it’s easy to go back, review a topic, and find your way around the system. Teams are typically up and running in under a month.
Department heads come around fast. They’re glad to finally see historical data and use it to build the next budget. And they trust the process more knowing they’re entering numbers into a database, not into a spreadsheet they’re one keystroke away from breaking.
“Budgyt saves time, increases accuracy by increasing transparency. It is a win-win-win.“
Across the nonprofits Advisors for Change has moved onto Budgyt, the same wins repeat:
For AFC’s own practice, the bet has held. Budgyt is where they run their internal budget and maintain rolling forecasts, and it’s the tool they keep recommending. The setup time that used to disappear into spreadsheet plumbing now goes into scenario planning, which Budgyt makes easy enough that a nonprofit no longer needs spare finance capacity to build out multiple scenarios.
Asked whether Budgyt is worth it, Amy doesn’t hedge: “100%. I think Budgyt is a great product for financial advisors who support small businesses and nonprofits, and for nonprofits of all sizes. We strongly recommend it when given the opportunity.”
We have never found a tool that is so easy to customize for multiple users with different levels of access at Budgyt's price point.
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See how finance teams ditched Excel chaos for bulletproof budgets and slept easier, every night.
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You manage millions of dollars. You make decisions affecting dozens of employees. You report to boards with fiduciary responsibility.
