Rethink Food Reclaims 2.5 Months of Manual Work Each Year With Planful

Rethink Food was founded in 2017 by chef Matt Jozwiak, who saw firsthand how much perfectly good food went unused in restaurant kitchens and set out to change that. Starting from a shared kitchen with donated ingredients, Rethink created a model that pays restaurants to prepare nutritious meals for their communities.

By the end of 2024, the organization had distributed 30 million meals and was producing 50,000 meals per week from Rethink’s restaurant partners and Sustainable Community Kitchen in Greenwich Village.

Behind every one of those meals is a financial model that must be disciplined, agile, and transparent to ensure every dollar is used effectively in support of Rethink Food’s mission.

With Planful in place, Rethink Food has:

• • Cut its annual budget cycle in half, from more than two months to under one month.
  • Gained 33% faster reporting capabilities, saving four hours per quarterly board report.
  • Reclaimed approximately 2.5 months of manual work annually.
  • Given department heads real-time budget-to-actual visibility for mid-month spending decisions.
  • Improved scenario planning for funding changes and expense alignment.
  • Expanded financial insight across the organization without adding headcount to the FP&A team.

Rethink Food operates across two legal entities, each running its own QuickBooks instance. For Christopher Hollinger, CFO, and William Ma, Senior Director of Finance and Technology, that meant every financial report required manual consolidation.

Finance had to export data from both systems, combine it in spreadsheets, reconcile the differences, and rebuild reports before presenting them to leadership.

“It was a manual process,” Christopher recalls. “We would do downloads. We would stitch things together in Excel or Google Sheets.”

The effort alone was significant, but the timing created another problem. By the time reports were finished, the underlying data could already be outdated.

“If I’m doing an export on Monday morning, by the time I’m finishing on Thursday, the export from Monday could look completely different,” William says.

As Rethink expanded into Miami and Chicago, financial operations became more complex. Like many nonprofits, the team had to manage multiple entities, track funding from a mix of government programs, corporate partners, and restaurant surcharges, and deliver reporting across departments and programs with different requirements.

Planful gave them a way to bring that complexity into one place, making it easier to consolidate entities, track shifting funding sources, and deliver consistent, program-level reporting.

Budgeting often stretched beyond two months. Quarterly board reporting required roughly 12 hours of preparation. And the team was still modeling shifting scenarios in spreadsheets.

“Our funding sources change pretty rapidly,” Christopher says. “We just couldn’t continue to do things like we did in the past.”

Christopher made the final decision to implement Planful after evaluating solutions that could bring structure and speed to Rethink’s growing financial operations.

Several capabilities aligned immediately with the organization’s needs. Planful integrates directly with QuickBooks, consolidates multiple entities, and allows department leaders to access their own financial data without relying on finance to produce every report.

Scenario planning was another critical requirement. Rethink needed a platform that could help leadership respond quickly when funding conditions changed.

“Planful was a great way for us to give what I consider enterprise-level financial analysis throughout the organization at a much lower cost than having to hire a large FP&A team,” Christopher says.

• Unified multi-entity reporting: Both of the company’s QuickBooks instances feed directly into Planful. Christopher and William can switch instantly between entity-level and consolidated views, eliminating the need to manually combine data.
• Department-level visibility: Program leaders access budget-to-actual reporting directly in Planful and adjust spending throughout the month. “Department heads are able to view their budgets to actuals at any given time,” William says. “They can readjust spending to make sure they stay within budget.”
• Expense transparency and cost control: With shared access to financial data, teams can quickly spot unexpected or rising costs and take action. “By using Planful, this has been increasing transparency,” William says. “When a cost is too high, we’re able to negotiate with different vendors to make sure we’re paying the best possible price.”
• Scenario planning and stress testing: With Planful, Christopher can model funding changes on demand, giving him a clearer view of how revenue shifts impact spending. “If government revenue goes down by fifteen percent, we can plan how expenses should adjust.”
• Cash flow forecasting: Christopher built a custom cash flow forecasting model in Planful to manage liquidity while maximizing interest-bearing cash balances.
• Embedded documentation and collaboration: Planful brings budget conversations into the platform, so notes, context, and decisions live alongside the data. That gives finance and business leaders a shared view of both the numbers and the reasoning behind them.
• Planful AI: Rethink Food uses Planful AI Help Assistant to quickly find answers within the platform. Planful Projections also made it possible for the team to leverage future forecasting and scenario planning.

Planful gave Rethink Food’s lean finance team the ability to operate at scale without expanding headcount. The budgeting cycle that once took more than two months now closes in less than one.

Quarterly board reporting dropped by 33%, shifting from twelve hours of preparation to eight. Separately, William estimates that Planful saves about two-and-a-half months of work per year, largely through a more efficient budgeting and reporting process.

More importantly, according to William, “By using Planful, it has enabled our team to make more strategic decisions.”

For a nonprofit where every dollar represents donor trust and community responsibility, financial clarity is essential. Department leaders now understand where resources are going and can act on that information quickly. Vendor negotiations happen with stronger data, and leadership receives reports they trust.

For Rethink Food, Planful’s financial insight directly supports its mission.

“It has really given our department heads much clearer insight into where money goes,” Christopher says. “That allows them to be much more efficient in using resources and providing meals to this community.”