Achieving Financial Clarity and Speed at Glenstone Foundation

About the Organization

Glenstone Foundation is a private nonprofit museum located on more than 230 acres in Potomac, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Founded in 2006 by Mitchell Rales and his wife Emily Wei Rales, the museum is free to the public and integrates modern and contemporary art, architecture, and landscape.

Like many nonprofits managing complex operations, Glenstone's finance team found that their budgeting tools weren't keeping pace with the organization's needs.

Since implementing Martus, the team has shifted its focus from assembling budget documents to actively managing the full budget cycle.

The Challenge

Glenstone Foundation’s finance team was spending an excessive amount of time consolidating data in Excel — a process that left budget managers working with information that was out of date by the time reports were finalized. With so much work going into spreadsheet maintenance, there was little capacity left to actually analyze numbers or respond to what they were seeing.

The manual process also created visibility gaps. Budget managers couldn't easily access live data on their own, which slowed down both day-to-day oversight and broader financial decision-making. Glenstone needed a solution that would get the right information into the right hands without requiring the finance team to spend their time building and distributing reports.

Why Martus

When Controller Laila Buckers began exploring options, word of mouth was the deciding factor. As she put it: "We went to a conference, and everyone in our industry was using Martus and loving it!" The recommendation-driven discovery gave the team confidence, and the ease of implementation made the decision straightforward.

The Solution

Martus gave Glenstone's finance team a platform built around real-time access and collaborative budgeting.

• Real-time dashboards give budget managers live access to financial data without waiting on manual reports
• Collaborative budgeting environment improved transparency and accountability across departments
• Personnel budgeting module replaced estimated benefits figures with actual data, improving the accuracy of budget assumptions
• Easy to use planner module reduced the learning curve and allowed staff to pull both detailed analysis and general information on their own

The Result

With Martus in place, Glenstone's finance team was able to redirect their time from building spreadsheets to actually managing finances. As Laila described it: "We can spend our time analyzing our numbers and really understanding our spending. Our budget managers now have live information at their fingertips."

The shift was meaningful beyond just efficiency. The collaborative environment improved transparency across teams, and the move to actual figures in personnel budgeting brought a new level of accuracy to the process. Laila also noted that the implementation was fast enough that the team was up and running without disruption.

"Martus Solutions has been a real asset in evolving our budgeting process. By moving us away from manual Excel spreadsheets, the focus has shifted from just creating to actual management of our budgetary cycle," she said.

Glenstone Foundation’s journey with Martus Solutions reflects a strategic pivot towards effective financial stewardship, enabling the organization to remain agile as it evolves.