Brentwood Baptist Church Transforms Budgeting with Martus

Brentwood Baptist Church, a vibrant community with 200 employees and nine campuses, faced significant challenges in managing its complex financial operations. In 2015, under the leadership of Lisa Francisco, the church adopted Martus to revolutionize their budgeting process. This strategic move not only enhanced productivity and collaboration but also provided seamless integration with Sage Intacct. The integration ensured accurate financial data, saved valuable time, and supported Brentwood’s financial stewardship and ministry growth mission.

Lisa explains:

“The ability to automatically sync data from Martus with Sage Intacct nightly and on demand is a huge advantage. In effect, the API integration of Martus budgets and forecasts with Sage Intacct is seamless, convenient, and always up to date.”

The results speak for themselves, with their team finding 2x faster decision-making, $25,000 worth of savings, and as much as a 50% time savings.

A Legacy of Faith and Financial Stewardship

When it comes to budgeting and forecasting, Brentwood Baptist has proven itself to be in the right place at the right time – as a long-time, loyal Martus customer.   

Brentwood Baptist was founded in 1969, with the congregational mission of “engaging the whole person with the whole gospel of Jesus Christ, anywhere, anytime, with anybody.”  

Today, Brentwood Baptist represents an example of one of Martus’ larger customers. Brentwood’s multi-campus model, today supporting 9 campuses, puts a lot of pressure on the accounting team when it comes to budgeting, reporting, and forecasting. 

For the past 21 years, Brentwood’s accounting team has been led by Lisa Francisco. While recently retired from full-time work with Brentwood, Lisa was kind to offer insights from her career with Brentwood as Executive Director of Central Support (5 years), and Business Administrator (16 years) – and her organization’s experience with Martus. 

Lisa remarks:  

“We’ve used a number of different accounting systems over the years for our non-profit, but the sheer size and complexity drove us to use Sage Intacct, the cloud-based accounting and financial management system.”

Managing Complex Finances with Martus

When discussing how Martus has helped streamline the church’s financial processes, Lisa provides further details on the system’s impact on their budgeting practices. She highlights the advancements they've made:

“Over the years, we’ve also become more sophisticated than older methods of budgeting with spreadsheets like Excel and Access, and we’ve taken our budgeting process to more productive, collaborative levels with Martus, from Martus Solutions. Because Martus looks and feels like a spreadsheet, all budget managers were able to learn the system quickly." 

She further elaborates:

"We began investigating Martus in 2014 and went live in 2015. We currently have 175 users on Martus, so based on our size, I believe we’re one of Martus’ larger customers.  We’ve never felt like we’re pushing any limitations size-wise, so we’re comfortable with where we are with Martus as our preferred budgeting, reporting, and forecasting solution.” 

Lisa emphasizes the importance of security:

“In addition to user access in Martus being controlled at the function and dimension level, we can also further restrict access to certain accounts and/or limit drill downs on certain accounts – which is very important at the user level.”

She continues:

“With our schools on separate books than the Ministry, we needed to be assured that we’d be able to control our complex finances without overtaxing our accounting teams. The Martus support team has always been there for us – from the very beginning – even with personal attention from Martus’ founder, Bill Cox.  He helped us immeasurably to get up and running quickly, and by helping to develop very flexible reports that we continue to rely on every day.”  

Seamless Onboarding and Support

Lisa highlights the onboarding experience and notes the integration benefits:

“Martus’ support team ensured we had a successful launch - everything was set up and they even did training sessions with our individual accounting team members who are responsible for budgeting. The support team is quick to respond, and always helpful.

The ability to automatically sync data from Martus with Sage Intacct nightly and on demand is a huge advantage. In effect, the API integration of Martus budgets and forecasts with Sage Intacct is seamless, convenient, and always up to date.” 

Lisa also underscores the importance of accuracy and concludes with the utility of Martus' reporting tools:

“For us, the accuracy of data is paramount. Martus’ reporting functionality has been equally vital, as we’ve used several reports to help catch budgeting and forecasting coding errors – before they impacted the organization.  From that perspective, Martus and Sage Intacct ‘play’ very well together.

The Martus Report Builder gives us the ability to export what are essentially multiple tab Excel sheets, by campus, location, department, account – whatever we happen to need.”

Discover the Martus Advantage

With Martus, Brentwood Baptist Church has increased responsiveness, streamlined budgeting for their 175 users, and saved up to 40 hours per month with the always instant availability of up-to-date financial reports tailored to the individual user’s needs. Most importantly, the Church now clearly understands their finances, enabling them to understand their ministries’ financial needs better as they carry out their core mission, vision, and values.

To discover how Martus can transform your organization's budgeting and financial management, reach out today to learn more about the comprehensive solutions offered by Martus. Start your journey towards enhanced productivity and financial clarity with Martus.