One Team, One Number: How Kari Hub Uses Martus to Give Nonprofit and Church Clients Better Budget Insights

About the Organization

Kari Hub is a client accounting services (CAS) firm built around a specific mission: serving churches and nonprofits, "a very under-served group in America," according to Jeremy Brown, VP of Finance. The firm goes beyond bookkeeping, bringing an FP&A lens to every client relationship.

Before Martus, Kari Hub layered various tools over QuickBooks and Sage, but those tools were built for reporting alone — they didn't get client teams meaningfully involved in their own numbers.

Today, Kari Hub uses Martus to run collaborative, team-wide budgeting for its nonprofit and church clients alongside reporting that reaches an entire client team the moment a month closes.

The Challenge

Kari Hub's team had tried layering various tools on top of QuickBooks and Sage in order to better support clients, but, "[the tools] didn't actually give that many unique reports." The team also identified a deeper issue: the challenge of delivering clear, concise financial insights that are easily understood by non-finance leaders during the budgeting process.

Why Kari Hub Chose Martus

What set Martus apart, Brown says, was something Kari Hub couldn't find anywhere else in the market: the ability to bring client staff directly into the budgeting and review process. "If an organization is going to move forward financially, they need more financial players. It can't just be on one person," he says. "Martus is one of the best that we've found that does that."

Rothfeld ties that same differentiator to budget ownership: the collaborative structure empowers department leaders to take an active role in budgeting.

The Solution

Inside Martus, Kari Hub's clients submit budgets that Kari Hub can approve, deny, adjust, or send back — a workflow Brown says saves significant time — and shifts client meetings toward strategy instead of data-wrangling. Any team member can drill into their own budget and actuals, while user level controls ensure they don’t access anything they should not. Reports that used to run ten pages get condensed into a one-page snapshot, with an expanded version available for clients who want it. And when a client's monthly numbers close, "everybody gets notified at once" instead of waiting days for reports to reach 50-plus team members.

Kari Hub also leverages Martus's Notes feature to deepen their support and streamline the analysis of budget variances. When a client struggled to explain these variances, Kari Hub implemented a policy requiring detailed notes for every submission, returning budgets if the documentation was insufficient. According to Brown, this change was transformative: rather than dismissing small discrepancies, clients could now pinpoint exactly which assumptions caused the variance. This emphasis on documented decision-making fosters ongoing client engagement, reinforcing Kari Hub's reputation as a firm that drives long-term success.

Results

The implementation of Martus has delivered immediate, tangible results for Kari Hub and its clients. Most notably, reports now reach clients the moment a month closes, eliminating the multi-day lag experienced prior to using the platform.

Support efficiency has also seen a significant boost, with turnaround times for complex chart-of-accounts questions during active budgeting reaching as fast as roughly three hours.

These improvements lead to a high level of functional performance; according to Rothfeld, Martus exceeds the functionality of much more expensive budgeting implementations he’s experienced in over two decades of FP&A work. Martus provides a robust solution at a much more accessible scale for budget-conscious churches and nonprofits.