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How Masucha Strategy Brings Modern Cash Visibility to Nonprofits

Highlights

  • One place to review cash activity
  • Structured reporting for easier reviews
  • A scalable workflow for future growth

The Problem

Masucha Strategy supports nonprofits that require structured cash visibility, consistent reporting, and strategic planning but lack full-time finance teams. As these organizations scale programs and expand operations, keeping up with inflows, restricted funds, and grant-based cycles becomes increasingly difficult to manage manually.

Before Obol, Vishnu relied on spreadsheets and manual bank logins to answer basic financial questions, slowing decision-making for teams that depend on clear, real-time cash information.

Nonprofits rely heavily on predictable cash positions, grant timing, and budget adherence, but their financial operations are often fragmented, highly manual, and dependent on multiple systems that don’t talk to each other.

“Before Obol, it was mainly using a spreadsheet, manually entering the starting and ending balances of the banks. I just had one simple sheet that showed the balance, and it was not breaking down whether it was an inflow or an outflow. I was just giving a summary.”
Vishnu Swaminathan,
Fractional CFO @ Masucha Strategy

For Vishnu, the challenge was straightforward:

Day-to-day reality without Obol:

  • Manual tracking on Google Sheets: Cash tracking was done in a spreadsheet with manually typed opening and closing balances. There was no breakdown of inflows or outflows, only a summary.
  • Fragmented data: Information about expected funds, grant receipts, and upcoming expenses lived across multiple tabs and sheets, making it hard to compare what was expected versus what was in the bank.
  • Multiple bank logins: Reviewing balances and updating clients required logging into various banks and investment accounts separately.
  • No integrated planning: Predicted donations or grant inflows were tracked in separate sheets and not directly tied to bank data, creating blind spots.
  • Heavy reporting burden: Answering simple questions like “What’s our current cash position?” required Vishnu to pull data from different places and reconcile it manually.

The Solution

Obol’s implementation for Masucha Strategy centered on giving Vishnu a single, reliable view of cash across his nonprofit clients.

The rollout included:

  • Centralized inflow/outflow views that replaced manual spreadsheets.
  • Category-level trend analysis so Vishnu could show clients where expenses fluctuated month to month.
  • One place to review cash, reducing the need for multiple logins.

With Obol, Vishnu now presents cash updates directly from the platform.

From Manual Work to Real-Time Conversations

The impact was immediate: Obol allowed Vishnu to replace manual checking and spreadsheet updates with a more structured, continuous understanding of cash.

Obol gives Vishnu and his nonprofit clients:

  • Clear trend visibility: Category-level patterns and monthly spikes became easy to identify.
  • Faster answers to leadership questions: Current positions and recent movements are available in one place.
  • More helpful conversations with boards and directors: Instead of static sheets, he can walk through real flows and trends.
“What you’re constantly looking for is the spikes. If an expense is going up or down, that’s important to know. Those are easy to spot in Obol because you can just click a category.”
— Vishnu Swaminathan

How Masucha Strategy Works Today

  • Vishnu uses Obol as his primary place to review client cash positions.
  • Nonprofit leaders get clearer visibility into inflows and outflows than spreadsheets ever offered.
  • Category-level insights help identify trends in program spending and payroll.
  • Reporting conversations with clients now start from real-time views instead of static exports.
  • Planning is being set up with support from Obol’s onboarding team, enabling expected inflows to align next to real bank activity.

Business Impact

  • A unified place to review cash activity without jumping between different systems.
  • Stronger visibility into inflows and outflows, giving leadership teams an accurate view of financial activity.
  • More structured reporting, making board updates and executive reviews easier to deliver.
  • A workflow built to scale as Vishnu continues growing his practice.

Vishnu’s Perspective

“We are beginning to leverage Obol, and it’s already making things easier. For me, the ability to use the bank data to predict cash flow is something I’ve been looking for.”
— Vishnu Swaminathan

A Foundation for Growth

For Masucha Strategy, bringing nonprofits onto Obol is about strengthening financial conversations and giving leadership a clearer view of how cash moves month over month. By moving away from static spreadsheets and toward a more organized, unified, structured workflow, Vishnu can walk teams through real cash activity, spot meaningful trends, and guide decisions with more confidence.

As he continues expanding his fractional CFO practice, Obol gives him a dependable framework he can apply across more nonprofit clients, allowing him to scale his work without recreating processes for each organization.

Manage your cash flow, not your spreadsheets