From Spreadsheets to Scale: How Brentwood Baptist Church Modernized Financial Management Across Nine Campuses

A nine-campus church replaced scattered spreadsheets with collaborative budgeting in Martus, cutting budgeting time in half.

About the Organization

Brentwood Baptist Church is a multi-campus faith community founded in 1969, with nine locations and approximately 200 employees. Grounded in the mission to engage the whole person with the gospel, the church has grown into one of the larger multi-site congregations in its region.

As the organization expanded, its financial operations grew increasingly complex, and the spreadsheet-based tools the team had relied on were no longer adequate for managing budgets collaboratively and accurately at scale.

With Martus, Brentwood Baptist brought structure, transparency, and efficiency to its financial processes, freeing the team to focus on higher-impact work.

The Challenge

Managing finances across nine campuses and a staff of 200 put significant pressure on Brentwood Baptist Church's budgeting and reporting processes. The spreadsheet-based tools the team relied on introduced version control issues, limited visibility across the organization, and made it difficult to maintain data integrity as the church grew and more stakeholders needed to access financial information.

Beyond accuracy concerns, the manual nature of budgeting and reporting processes made it hard for the finance team to respond quickly to shifting needs. Ensuring that sensitive financial data was appropriately secured and that access could be controlled at a granular level was also a growing challenge. The team needed a solution that could keep pace with the church's size and complexity while supporting the kind of careful, collaborative stewardship their mission demanded.

The Solution

Brentwood Baptist Church selected Martus for its combination of ease of use, robust access controls, and integration with Sage Intacct. The platform's familiar, spreadsheet-like interface enabled budget managers to get up to speed quickly, while its security architecture gave the finance team precise control over who could see and do what.

Key elements of the solution included:

• Sage Intacct integration kept budgets and forecasts consistently current
• Role-based access controls allowed the team to protect sensitive data while still enabling department participation in the budgeting process
• Reporting tools helped the team identify budgeting and forecasting coding errors before they affected the organization, improving accuracy throughout the process
• Collaborative budgeting replaced fragmented spreadsheets, giving staff across campuses a shared, reliable view of financial data

The Result

With Martus in place, Brentwood Baptist Church reported significant improvements in both efficiency and financial accuracy. The finance team described the Sage Intacct integration as seamless, and the organization's ability to catch coding errors before they had downstream impact was noted as a meaningful operational gain.

• 2x faster decisions
• Time spent on budgeting reduced by 50%
• Approximately 40 hours per month freed for higher-impact work