Jewish Community Services of Baltimore replaced manual Excel tracking with Instrumentl Spenddown  — transforming how their entire team monitors, reports on, and manages expenses across 35+ active restricted grants.

The Challenge

JCS manages a portfolio of more than 35 grants across multiple funders and projects. Before Instrumentl, expense tracking and grant reporting lived entirely in Excel  – and the process was, in Nicole’s words, nonexistent.

Finance staff would manually pull data from their accounting system, reclassify transactions, verify funding sources, and assemble budget-to-actual reports line by line. A single grant report could take an hour. Multiply that across 35+ grants, and the team was spending roughly 35 hours a month just producing reports, and still running months behind.

Grant managers like Linda couldn’t access financial data independently. When she needed to know how much was left in a particular grant, she’d have to request the information from finance and wait. Meanwhile, decisions about budget modifications, spending pace, and reallocation were being made with stale data.

“There was no process. We were reporting expenses a couple months behind, and it was all being done manually.”
‍— Nicole Wheeler, Controller | JCS Baltimore

The Solution

JCS joined Instrumentl’s design partner program to pilot Instrumentl Spenddown  – uploading their funder-approved grant budgets and integrating with Sage Intacct to sync expenses. 

The team worked closely with Instrumentl to configure grant-level mappings, set up periodic syncs, and align their Sage chart of accounts with how they wanted to see data in Instrumentl.

Within weeks, JCS had their full grant portfolio mapped and expenses flowing in automatically  – giving the team a single view of budget-to-actual status across all 35+ grants for the first time.

The Results

What previously took Nicole 45–60 minutes per grant now takes about 15 minutes. Across a portfolio of 35+ grants reported monthly, that’s a conservative estimate of 30 hours a month  – or 360 hours a year  – returned to the team.

But the time savings only tell part of the story. The more meaningful shift is in how the entire organization collaborates on grants.

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Linda S. leads resource development strategy at JCS, providing direction to executive leadership on funder research, grant applications, and grant management. Yet before Spenddown, she had no direct access to financial data to see where grant spenddown stood for grants across programs. Any budget question meant a request to finance.

With Spenddown data synced directly into Instrumentl, Linda can pull budget-to-actual reports for any grant independently, and act and communicate timely reports on what she sees to relevant program leaders across the organization.  

"This feature has enabled me to provide timely financial reports to our service-area managers and proactively reach out to them when I have had concerns about workflows."
‍— Linda S.,Resource Development Senior Manager, JCS Baltimore

When program staff have visibility into spending pace and budget alignment in real time, concerns surface earlier, before they become reporting problems or jeopardize a renewal.

“Now Linda doesn’t have to wait for us to do it. She can go in and run a report herself. That’s the part I like  – it takes a lot of the burden off of us.”
‍— Nicole W., Controller, JCS Baltimore

The Unexpected Win: Cleaner Processes Across the Org

JCS had recently migrated to Sage Intacct and was still establishing their chart of accounts when they began the Instrumentl integration. The process of mapping grants and funding sources in Instrumentl surfaced structural gaps in how Sage was configured  – like grants from the same funder that needed to be separated by project to produce accurate reports.

Rather than creating a problem, this became an accelerant. The integration gave the team a concrete reason to fix foundational data issues they’d been discussing internally but hadn’t prioritized. Ken described the effect as getting JCS back to a solid foundation that communicates properly across all their systems.

“It’s making a world of a difference. We’re swimming, not taking water on.”
‍—Ken B., Senior Accountant, JCS Baltimore

Because the finance team is no longer spending hours on manual report assembly, they’ve been able to get current on other operational work  – creating a compounding effect where improved grant reporting unlocks capacity across the entire organization.

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See how Instrumentl’s post-award tools connect to your accounting system and eliminate manual reporting.