From Spreadsheets to Centralized Budgeting: How Georgia Tech Alumni Association Streamlined Financial Management with Martus

About the Organization

TheGeorgia Tech Alumni Association serves and promotes the Institute and its alumni through programming and engagement that fosters lifelong relationships, philanthropic support, and goodwill.

The finance team was managing budgets across a patchwork of individual Excel spreadsheets, making the process time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to scale.

Since moving to Martus, the organization has centralized its financial operations and given managers direct access to real-time data, eliminating the wait for reports and improving visibility across the board.

The Challenge

For Allison Hickman, VP of Administration at the Georgia Tech Alumni Association, budget season meant manual work. The finance team was budgeting entirely in spreadsheets, and coordinating that process across managers was largely on Allison's shoulders.

Beyond the time burden, the spreadsheet approach created visibility gaps. Managers had to wait for reports rather than being able to check on their budgets independently, which slowed down the organization's ability to stay current with its financial plan.

Why Martus

When evaluating options, Allison cited two factors that made Martus stand out: robustness and pricing. The platform offered the functionality the association needed without the cost or complexity of a larger enterprise system.

The Solution

Martus replaced the association's disconnected spreadsheets with a centralized budgeting platform, giving every manager direct access to real-time financial data. Key elements of the solution included:

• Collaborative budgeting — managers can build and monitor their own budgets independently, without waiting on Finance to compile and distribute reports
• Real-time data visibility — financial information is accessible across the organization at any time, improving transparency and accountability
• Year-over-year roll forward — Allison identified this as the standout feature, significantly reducing the administrative work involved in starting a new budget cycle
• Sage 50 integration — actuals data is uploaded from Sage 50 into Martus, connecting the association's accounting system to its budgeting process and minimizing manual data entry

The Result

The most significant shift for the Georgia Tech Alumni Association has been in how managers engage with financial information. "I don't have to manually compile everything myself," she noted after making the switch to Martus.

Where managers once waited for reports, they can now monitor budgets and track performance on their own, in real time.

That change in access has kept the organization more current with its budgeting plan and brought greater clarity to financial decision-making at all levels of leadership.

• Decision-making speed improved 4x with access to real-time data
• Up to 10 hours per month saved on budgeting and reporting tasks