Transformative Financial Management at Ward Church with Martus Solutions

A Michigan church moved budgeting off spreadsheets and gave budget holders visibility in Martus without extra Sage Intacct licenses.

Ward Church is a multi-generational congregation serving communities in Northville and Farmington Hills, Michigan, with services also offered online. Before adopting Martus, the church's finance team relied on spreadsheets to manage budgeting — a process that required distributing files, collecting them back, fixing broken formulas, and manually keying the data into their accounting system, Sage Intacct. That manual workflow left plenty of room for human error and ate up staff time that could have gone toward the church's mission. Since implementing Martus, Ward Church has cut budgeting time by as much as 10 hours a month and given staff a clear, real-time view of spending without the need to dig for answers.

The Challenge

Prior to Martus, Chris Ockerman and his team managed the church's budgeting process almost entirely through spreadsheets. That meant distributing Excel files to budget holders across the organization, collecting them back, repairing broken formulas, and hand-keying the results into Sage Intacct. As Chris put it, "There are so many places for human error to sneak in." Beyond the manual workload, giving staff visibility into their budgets and donor-restricted fund balances meant granting them direct access to Sage Intacct — an approach that added unnecessary licensing costs for a church managing its resources carefully.

Why Martus

Chris didn't come to Martus through an extensive vendor search — the recommendation came strongly and repeatedly from peers in the church finance community. "I haven't considered other products," he said. "Too many people told me this is the way to go." What sealed the decision was Martus's direct integration with Sage Intacct, paired with an interface simple enough that budget holders across the church could use it without needing full accounting system access.