giving back time to focus
on what matters most

A Budgyt Case Study:

the quick details:

Industry: Non-Profit
Admin Role: Sr.Dir.
Finance & Accounting

Location: East Ontario
Users: 24
P&L's: 26

Accounting Software:
Excel

There was a time when we lacked access to affordable technology to make the auditing of customized formulas and complicated spreadsheets simpler and more reasonable. Spreadsheet errors that would cumulatively amount to large sums in the thousands would be dismissed and written off as the cost of using complex software and “doing business.” But these costs can slowly gnaw away at an organizations’ reserves, creating a compounding problem that’s simply been ignored. Now more than ever, reserves have proven to be so critical— their value appreciated even more during unprecedented times like the ones we face in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is the challenge that Jason Kempt faced when he joined United Way as Senior Director of Finance & Accounting a few of years ago. Having worked for the National Defense prior to joining United Way, Jason was accustomed to the types of financial tools and software that existed for larger companies. But when he inherited an outdated and over-complicated set of spreadsheets to handle the budgeting process for United Way’s Ottawa chapter, he searched for a solution that could help solve these problems at an affordable rate for a Nonprofit organization like themselves. That’s when he came across Budgyt. Jason worked with James to address the complexities of their budgeting process, and we urgently found him a solution that would solve his following pains and challenges:

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.

the features we delivered that
empowered them to know what's next

User Adoption

Intuitiveness

Team Collaboration

Time SAvings

View All Features & Benefits

the most unexpected benefit:
immediate user adoption

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.”

the most convenient benefit:
Intuitiveness

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” - JasonOur 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

the core benefit:
team collaboration

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

the most welcomed benefit:
affordability

“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.

the unknown benefit:
BETTER COST ALLOCATION

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.

“I have to admit, I sometimes sound like I'm a very zealous convert. But when I worked in Deloitte, we used to try and sell capabilities like this for the big ERP systems. And honestly, Budgyt has done everything that we used to sell. All those benefits we used to include in our sales pitch—we realized in the first year that Budgyt has them, and the budgeting process has just been a breeze.”

JASON KEMPT

UnitedWay: East ontario

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