“Like a Spreadsheet on Steroids”: Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters Gains Faster, More Accurate Budgeting with Martus

Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters (KSBBBS) creates and supports mentoring relationships that ignite the power and promise of youth, connecting more than 1,800 young people with caring adult mentors annually. With a volunteer base contributing over 150,000 hours each year, KSBBBS has earned national recognition from Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Forbes, and USA Today for its quality mentoring and innovative approach to nonprofit management. 

Previously, KSBBBS managed individualized budgets across 12+ communities using spreadsheets—a manual, error-prone process that overwhelmed the finance team. 

Since switching to Martus, the organization's budgeting is faster, more accurate, and less manual, enabling better projections and bringing the organization closer to its mission.

The Challenge

For Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters, financial management was anything but simple. Operating across more than 12 Kansas communities—each with its own events and budget requirements—the organization’s finance team found itself buried in spreadsheets and manual processes.

“The budgeting process was overwhelming, and it was so manual that it was too prone to errors,” said Naima Loera-Mexsen, Controller at KSBBBS.

These challenges were especially noticeable in personnel budgeting. Modeling salary changes, benefit costs, and mid-year adjustments in Excel was technically possible, but impractical. “It was a whole day or two or three day project,” Naima recalls.

Why Martus

Naima knew that the budgeting solution she selected would need to support the finance team as well as program managers, HR, and organizational leaders.

The organization needed a solution that offered:

• Integration with MIP - Abila Server
• User level permissions
• Rapid onboarding
• Easy end user experience
• Personnel budgeting

 Naima had previously used Martus at another nonprofit; she knew firsthand that it could meet all their needs and quickly transform the budget process at KSBBBS. “I loved Martus, so we brought it back,” she said.

The Solution

Since adopting Martus, Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters has transformed the way it approaches financial planning. Each community is now able to build and manage its own budget, with all budgets and actuals rolling up to the main finance team led by Naima. Department leaders can access their own budget data without visibility into other teams’ financials.

An especially useful product for the team has been the personnel budgeting module.  Thanks to Martus,KSBBBS can budget by position – modeling benefit costs by type, handling mid-year rate changes, and accounting for staff time allocated across multiple departments or programs. Positions can even be created without an attached employee, giving the team flexibility to plan for future hires.

Scenario planning  models “what-if” situations in minutes rather than days. “You create a scenario and you can copy it and make changes—copying takes five seconds,” she says. “This has been a huge game changer for us. This tool is so powerful.”

Reporting has been equally transformative. The variety of reporting formats and the ease of filtering data gives department heads, the finance team, and organizational leadership clearer financial visibility in a fraction of the time that it took to pull reports from Excel.

The Result

The impact of using Martus has been both immediate and measurable for KSBBBS. Budgeting is faster, more accurate, and easily accessible to departments. Scenarios that previously required a full day or more to model in Excel can be built, copied, and adjusted on the fly, giving leadership faster insight for better decision making. The finance team now has a more accurate understanding of costs across departments, positions, and the organization as a whole. And because Martus’s user permissions allow department leaders to access their own budget data securely, finance is no longer a bottleneck for information the whole organization depends on.

Spreadsheets still have their place at KSBBBS, but as Naima says, “Martus is like a spreadsheet on steroids. Spreadsheets are convenient because we use them daily, but you don’t realize how much you are missing out on until you use a budgeting tool like Martus.”

With stronger financial tools in hand, Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters is better positioned than ever to fulfill its mission—ensuring that Kansas youth have the mentoring relationships they need to thrive.