It’s been a week since Mazlo officially launched and it’s been pretty exciting times for the team.
Just a few years ago I was a digital nomad doing freelance software development with a remote team while traveling. On the advice of a friend, I took a Zoom call from Bali with a guy who wanted to solve a really hard problem for a nonprofit. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Discovering the Real Pain Point
Like Kian mentioned, the original problem we were working on didn’t turn out to be the real problem we wanted to solve. Conversation after conversation with nonprofit operators led us to a clear conclusion: it all boiled down to money. Specifically, where it came from and from whom, and where it was going and for what. That was more than a problem, it was pain.
So we built Mazlo.
I wanted to walk you through just a tiny bit of what we’ve come up with for the people on the front lines, the ones trying to help people far and wide. Sadly, they’ve been left to deal with a rat's nest of solutions and providers to track their finances, which are the lifeblood of any nonprofit project. That was a recipe for disaster, so we set out to solve that pain.
Here’s how.
How Mazlo Simplifies Compliance and Workflows
For a non-profit, every dollar in and dollar out triggers a workflow that has to be auditable and compliant. So, what we’ve done is we've taken those transactions and we’ve enriched them with accounting details, receipts, comment threads with staff and admins, statuses and more. In the case of a donation, adding specific accounting codes will trigger a generation of a donation acknowledgment letter.
That acknowledgement letter is added to an individual's record so that you can provide an end-of-year statement on their giving. Something that’s required to stay compliant as a nonprofit. And if you don’t stay compliant, you could lose grants, have to deal with audits or worse…have to stop what you’re doing altogether. You get the picture.
The Old Way vs. The Mazlo Way
How would people do all of this before using Mazlo? I’m glad you asked.
Remember Kian’s “chaos chart”?
You would download a bank statement with all of your transactions, you would go reference a form or some document that somebody gave you, and then you would put that together and send it over to your accounting software. If someone received a donation and didn’t submit their "Deposit notification form”, those funds could go missing indefinitely. Painful. And that’s just a small part of the bigger picture of what administrators at a nonprofit have to manage on a daily basis.
We built a platform that makes it possible for nonprofits to manage their grant and program codes, spin up bank accounts in minutes, issue and manage spending cards, handle donation campaigns, and all with readily accessible audit trails.
Reducing Burdens for All Nonprofits
The administrative costs and time spent on back office tasks are real concerns, and sometimes nonstarters, for the biggest organizations all the way down to someone like you and me who might be thinking about setting up a small project supported by a fiscal sponsor to help others.
You can always hit us up for a demo, and I’ll be sharing other parts of the platform in the days to come, but hopefully I was able to give you an idea of how we’re attacking these really hard and painful problems in hopes of clearing the way for more good to be done in the world.
Early Results and What’s Ahead
How’s it going so far? Pretty well. In fact, one of our earliest customers, E2AC, has scaled from 5 to 150 projects in 6 months thanks in part to what we’ve built. More on them another time, but these are the kinds of stories and results that keep us going.