Predictable Futures: How Rappahannock Goodwill Industries Revolutionized Planning and Budgeting

About the Organization

Rappahannock Goodwill Industries (RGI) is a nonprofit organization best known to the public for its retail donation stores. But behind the storefronts is a broader mission: using proceeds from retail operations to fund workforce development programs. RGI helps individuals including those returning to work after incarceration, extended time out of the workforce, or disability rebuild skills and find employment, while also supporting the businesses that hire them.

RGI's finance function is lean by design: a four-person team, led by CFO, Terri Swetnam PhD, is responsible for budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting across the entire organization.

The Challenge

Like many nonprofits with limited finance staff and competing priorities, RGI relied on a patchwork of spreadsheets and email to manage its budgeting and forecasting process. The results were predictable:

• Version control chaos. Budget files moved between Excel and Google Sheets, with inconsistent naming conventions that made it difficult to identify the most current version.
• A finance team stretched thin. Terri's team spent more than half their time chasing down department managers for inputs, consolidating spreadsheets, and reconciling numbers rather than analyzing them.
• A "hamster wheel" cadence. RGI's budget was typically approved in the fourth quarter, but by the time it was finalized, business conditions had already begun to shift. A mid-year forecast took nearly as long to produce as the original budget and, by the time it was complete, was already outdated.
• Limited confidence in the numbers. Even when forecasts were produced, Terri described being "always nervous" about their accuracy and validity for the kind of predictive analysis the organization needed.
• Scenario planning was effectively out of reach. With so much time spent maintaining a single master version of the budget, building multiple what-if scenarios or multi-year projections was, in Terri's words, "to a large degree out of the question."
• A communication gap with non-finance managers. Many of the department heads submitting budget inputs weren't financial professionals, and translating what finance needed from them added another layer of friction to an already slow process.

Why Martus

The tipping point came when RGI's finance team realized that an annual budget or even a single mid-year forecast simply wasn't predictive enough to support real decision-making. By the time a problem showed up in the numbers, it was often too late in the year to meaningfully adjust revenue or expenses.

Terry began searching for a collaborative real-time solution that would solve their budgeting and planning woes.

The Solution

RGI implemented Martus to centralize budgeting, forecasting, and reporting in a single, collaborative system. Key elements of the implementation and product rollout included:

• A phased change-management approach. Rather than asking managers to jump straight into a new system, RGI's finance team first distributed Excel templates styled to mirror the Martus interface, then gradually transitioned managers to entering data directly into Martus the following year — by which point they were already comfortable with the layout and process.
• Integration with Sage Intacct, allowing actuals to flow into Martus automatically so department managers can see real-time expense data against their budgets without waiting on finance to produce a report.
• Distributed ownership of the budget. Terry made a deliberate shift away from the idea that "budgets belong to finance," instead positioning each department as the owner of its own numbers, with finance facilitating data collection, consolidation, and analysis.
• Simple, plain-language enablement materials, including job aids with screenshots, so managers who don't work in the budget system every day can make updates confidently without finance hand-holding every step.
• A shift to monthly forecasting, supported by real-time actuals rather than manual, end-of-month reporting.

The Result

Since moving off spreadsheets and onto Martus, RGI has seen measurable improvements across its budgeting and forecasting process:

• Significant time savings. 50% time savings for the finance team; freeing the finance team to focus on analysis rather than data collection.
• Real-time visibility. Actuals sync from Sage Intacct directly into Martus, so the team no longer waits until month-end to see whether departments are tracking on or off budget.
• Monthly forecasting became achievable. RGI moved from an occasional mid-year forecast to a regular monthly cadence, giving leadership current data to support decision-making throughout the year.
• Stronger cross-department accountability. Because managers can see their own budget-to-actual data directly in the system, finance spends less time chasing updates and more time on higher-value analysis. Now managers can see and understand that the budget reflects their own input, not a number imposed by finance.
• Scenario planning became a real capability, not an aspiration. With less time spent on manual data-gathering, RGI's team can now quantify different outcomes — from the impact of a grant being awarded or not renewed, to the effects of adding a new location or line of service — giving leadership clearer insights for decision-making.
• Improved data-driven decision-making. Having a single, shared source of information rather than outdated, historical assumptions or scattered spreadsheets, has increased the confidence and objectivity behind organizational decisions, particularly around funding scenarios that shift with grant cycles, economic conditions, and local market factors.
• No concerns on security or control. RGI evaluated Martus's security posture during its RFP process and reports no issues with system reliability or data access controls since going live.