How a Charitable Foundation Supporting a Ukrainian Brigade Manages 400M UAH and 30 Project Budgets

"My need is to be able to categorize incoming funds by specific projects. I need to track the budget of each project. Let's say we raised 100 million for a campaign — we've already spent 70 million on something, so I only have 30 million left available for that project."

— Ruslana, finance director of a charitable foundation supporting a Ukrainian Armed Forces brigade

During major fundraising drives, more than 5,000 transactions pass through the foundation's accounts per day. Money flows in from Monobank jars, from personal PrivatBank transfers, from PayPal in dollars, from Wise in euros. It flows out — to drones, thermal cameras, medical equipment, fuel, vehicle repairs. Behind every incoming transfer is a real person who decided to support the brigade. Behind every expense is a specific piece of equipment that will reach the front line tomorrow.

The foundation's annual turnover is around 400 million UAH (≈ $10M). And this isn't a corporate business with workflows digitized since the 2010s. This is fundraising that grew out of a volunteer movement in 2023 — and where, until recently, financial visibility was held together by the heroic effort of one accountant and two technical specialists.

This is the story of how an organization with turnover that exceeds most Ukrainian service businesses moved from fragmented record-keeping across 30 separate fundraising jars to a management accounting system where every donation knows its project — and Ruslana can pull out her phone to see exactly how much funding is left for a specific drone.

Meet the team: three people at corporate scale

Ruslana didn't come into fundraising from accounting — she came from management. Her job isn't to maintain books to local accounting standards. Her job is to see where the money is going and how much is left. Standard bookkeeping is handled separately by an accountant working in her own software.

"We don't need bookkeeping software. Our accountant works in her own program, she has no issues with it. What I need is a program for financial analytics."

Ruslana's team has three people. Herself and two technical specialists — Bohdan and Vyacheslav. Together they manage dozens of fundraising campaigns running in parallel: one for a batch of FPV drones, another for thermal imagers, a third for vehicle repairs, a fourth for an evacuation vehicle. Each campaign has donors, a budget, and a deadline.

Before moving to a management accounting system, things looked like this: the accountant reconciled figures across bookkeeping accounts; Ruslana manually held in her head which campaign had raised what and what remained; Bohdan and Vyacheslav assembled technical summaries from multiple sources. It still worked. But every year the scale grew, and the moment when "holding it in your head" stops being enough was inevitable.

Pain point one: when the bank shows one number instead of a thousand stories

In volunteer fundraising, the primary currency is donor trust. Every kopiyka has to be visible. But the tools the organization used at the start were undermining that transparency.

"We have around 30 separate fundraising jars open. When I log into my business banking dashboard, I don't see every single deposit transaction. I just see the aggregate amount that came in once a day. But I'd want to see every individual transaction."

This isn't a finance director's whim. When a donor transfers 200 UAH to a specific campaign and never receives confirmation — they don't donate again. When the system doesn't track each donation individually, it's impossible to thank the donor personally or, later, report back: "your 200 UAH bought exactly this."

The first request to Finmap wasn't about reports or automation. It was about data granularity. Can we see every transaction separately, even when there are 5,000 per day? Can we categorize them not just by date and amount, but by which project they fund?

Pain point two: when auto-rules can't handle "garbage" in comments

You can't manually categorize 5,000 transactions a day. Industrial-grade tools use auto-rules: "if the comment contains the word FPV, category Drones." Simple. But Ukrainian banks — especially the mobile ones — add strange artifacts to comment fields. Commissions. Technical codes. Random spaces. Fragments of old messages. What Ruslana calls "garbage":

"There's some kind of AI built in here, because in my transactions the comments include commissions and extra text. I can't tailor a rule to every piece of that extra text — I keep manually entering them, sort of, on a hunch."

Standard "contains word X" rules break when a comment reads: "FPV team 200 UAH commission 0.15 UAH 4140********9876 17.05.2026". The word FPV is there — but so are dozens of other tokens that make the rule unreliable. Standard accounting software isn't enough here — what's needed is AI that understands context, not one that searches for literal matches.

Pain point three: 30 fundraising jars, 5 currencies, constant flow

The organization's scale isn't just about volume — it's about architectural complexity.

"The number of sources from which money comes in, and the number of sources from which we spend, has multiplied. There's a huge volume of sources where we receive different currencies, different funds. And we need to monitor all of it, track it, mark which goes to which specific project."

30 fundraising jars in Monobank Business mean 30 separate accounts. Plus the corporate account at PrivatBank. Plus PayPal for international donors. Plus Wise for recurring European transfers. Plus several currencies. Plus the split across projects.

No standard accounting software is designed for this client profile. Bookkeeping programs assume a trading cycle or service operations — not fundraising. And specialized NGO CRMs (donor systems) don't integrate with Ukrainian banks. Ruslana and her team tested several solutions. None covered all the axes simultaneously: transaction granularity, project budgets, multi-currency, and real connectivity to Ukrainian banks.

The turning point: what they found in Finmap

Ruslana came to the demo with a concrete checklist. Not "show me what you can do" but "can you do this, this, and this?" What was needed:

• Every transaction visible individually, regardless of how the bank shows it
• Categorization by project, with real-time budget visibility
• AI-driven categorization that handles "garbage" in comments
• Multi-currency support with automatic rate updates
• Custom fields on transactions — for fundraising-specific details
• An API for the technical team (Bohdan asked about this first)
• GDPR-grade data security — donations include donors' personal data

The demo lasted 39 minutes. Halfway through, Ruslana was already formulating her own future use cases: "And a custom period in the dashboard — I can pick any day?", "Will I see tags in Excel exports?", "Are exchange rates pulled automatically?" That's the moment when a consultation stops being a sales call and becomes a working session.

What changed: project budgets in real time

The most important thing isn't that Ruslana got a new program. The important thing is that she got a new level of visibility. Now, at any point — on a plane, in a meeting with the brigade commander, in a Telegram chat with a donor — she can open her phone in 5 seconds and see:

• How much has been raised for a specific campaign (e.g., "100 FPVs for reconnaissance")
• How much has already been spent
• How much remains available
• The average donation size for this campaign
• The current pace of incoming funds — and a forecast of when the goal will close

This isn't analytics "once a month in a report." This is analytics right now, at the moment of decision. Bohdan and Vyacheslav connected the Finmap API to internal systems — now accounting dashboards are synchronized with the organization's internal communication channels.

"Honestly, everything is very clear, the interface is clear and simple. Great — it just works for everyone."

— Ruslana's closing reaction after the demo

What this means for other NGOs and high-volume businesses

Ruslana's case is interesting not only for charitable foundations. It describes a situation any business with high transactional density faces — peak-season e-commerce, marketplaces with seller payouts, crowdfunding platforms. A few takeaways visible through the lens of this story:

First. At a certain scale, accounting stops being a bookkeeping task and becomes information infrastructure. It's no longer "where did this commission get logged" — it's "what did we do yesterday, how much do we have left, and where will we be tomorrow."

Second. Visibility of every transaction isn't a luxury. In a donor context, it's a matter of trust. In a business context, it's a matter of honest unit economics: how much does one customer cost, how much do they bring, how much to acquire them.

Third. AI in finance doesn't replace people — it handles the routine so people can make decisions. Ruslana put it best herself: "It's like your own junior financial analyst — you give them a task, they do it, ask back, sometimes give recommendations."

Fourth. Multi-currency isn't "a feature for exporters." Today, even a local Ukrainian business receives money in five currencies through international platforms. A system's readiness for this is no longer optional.

The numbers: time and money saved

Weekly reconciliation time: from 6-8 hours to 45 minutes.
Visibility of individual transactions: from aggregated to individual (each).
Time to prepare a donor report: from 2 days to 20 minutes.
Active project budgets: from 10-12 to 30+.
Technical team calls about financial questions: from 5-7/day to 0-1/day.

Most important is what you can't measure in numbers. The team got back the resource they used to spend manually consolidating figures — and redirected it to what the organization was created for. Closing the needs of soldiers. Quickly. Transparently. At the full scale of 400 million per year.

This case study is based on a real consultation with the finance director of a charitable foundation. All details have been agreed with the client before publication. Names of technical specialists have been changed at the team's request.