United Way

Decentralized system

United Way is a heavily siloed organization which adds complexity to their business. It had too many cost centers and too many GL codes, and the process was decentralized and spread across various spreadsheets. This created a very daunting task of having to merge and consolidate all of the different data together for cost recovery.

This also meant having to manage formulas and potential errors across a wide variety of unique spreadsheets with varying levels of complexity, resulting in a high investment of labor hours to address these challenges.

Real time view of Bottom Line impact

With different teams working within disconnected spreadsheets, business leaders were not able to immediately see the impacts of the decisions and allocations to United Way’s bottom line when assessing budgets or making business decisions.

This resulted in days of consolidation to identify the fault and reprise it, before business leaders could make any serious decisions.

User Adoption

In having to constantly endure the daunting task of merging all of the complicated data and spreadsheets together, they started to feel what we refer to as Budgeting FOBO (Fear Of Broken fOrmulas): when the magnitude of any single formula error causes unneeded stress and anxiety.

As these fears manifested with increased errors and missing links over time, they needed to take quick action to upgrade their outdated process, or risk having these errors slowly gnaw away at their reserves.

Complex budgets: Cost allocation

The complexity of United Way is attributed to the various services they provide, but in particular, it is in cost re-allocation.

Specifically, United Way processes the charitable workplace campaign for the federal government of Canada on behalf of a wide variety of charities, incurring costs in doing so.

The process to recover the costs of handling their various charities only increases the complexity of their entire process.

Immediate user adoption

The most unexpected benefit:

In Jason’s own words: “[With Budgyt], I was surprised when we rolled it out based on the fact we’ve got four Vice Presidents here, each of them responsible for their own area and all with very different personality types. I was surprised how all four of them took to this like a duck to water. One of them actually said she enjoyed the budget process, and that was our marketing person so I was not expecting that. It almost gamified [budgeting] for them—inputting in the numbers and seeing what would come back out. I was really surprised at how quick the user adoption was.”

Intuitiveness

The most convenient benefit:

Our easy to build and intuitive custom dashboards has helped Jason stay up to speed and easily process data in real time. “I find myself going in and actually pulling the data out of Budgyt, because it’s just more intuitive and more convenient to work with” – Jason. Our easy to build and intuitive custom dashboards has helped Jason stay up to speed and easily process data in real time. “I find myself going in and actually pulling the data out of Budgyt, because it’s just more intuitive and more convenient to work with” – Jason

Team collaboration

The core benefit

Budgyt empowers companies to embrace team collaboration. It’s why we don’t charge for users as we believe that the best budgets are those with the most collaboration. And it wasn’t just Jason’s users who benefited, but the entire organization was able to see and praise the benefits of their new budgeting process:

“The functionality [of Budgyt] actually mirrors the sales pitch. This year, we approved our budget right after the COVID 19 shutdown and people started working remotely. So our first board meeting [after implementing Budgyt] was done remotely. Our treasurer and the board chair and our chief executive kept lavishing praise on the budget process. Now, they’re not necessarily understanding it was enabled by Budgyt, but everything they were praising was a direct result of Budgyt. And that was because of how collaborative the VPs were, how much time they were able to talk about the business, and how they could talk about business activities first. Then the numbers followed behind. That’s the hallmark of a good budget process—where people can talk about the business instead of playing around with a bunch of spreadsheets.” – Jason

Affordability

The most welcomed benefit

I love the nonprofit sector, but the nonprofit sector sometimes doesn’t help itself. A tool like this is quite affordable and quite helpful, and basically pays for itself in the first year.” – Jason

Feel free to connect with Jason via Linkedin here and ask him yourself how much Budgyt saved United Way East Ontario in potential losses—and you’ll see how Budgyt can pay for itself with the savings you’ll benefit from.

Better cost allocation

The unknown benefit

With better budgeting tools in place, United Way was able to save time they normally would have spent merging decentralized data or ensuring formulas were without errors and missing links. This more holistic view of their budgets led them to discover their fundraising revenue was down, but government grant revenue was going up. Even further, they could easily identify which fundraising activity they needed to pull from, and which grants they needed to chase and invest in. Our hyperlinking feature allows users like United Way to better analyze spending patterns, giving them more time to focus on what matters most—securing revenue to support the charities and communities they represent.