Hack the Domo Stack: Real-World Budgeting with a Custom App

Budgeting shouldn't feel like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. But if you're part of a finance team in a large organization that's exactly what it might feel like with every budget cycle. Even if you're an experienced financial leader, it can be overwhelming when managing dozens of disconnected spreadsheets, manual report updates, and data scattered across different sources.

Each month can feel like piecing together a whole new puzzle, hoping to avoid mistakes in unreliable budget tracking software.

You're not alone. Chief financial officers (CFOs) report that manual budgeting processes waste up to six weeks per cycle. And with nearly 90 percent of all spreadsheets containing some kind of error, from hidden formula flaws to data mismatches, there's a good chance these inefficiencies waste your time, raise your stress, and risk accuracy, compliance, and strategic decision-making.

It's a process that was built for a slower world. Today's pace requires something better. Something that merges agility and governance with the ability to work together while budgeting confidently and at scale.

If you've ever wished budgeting could be less painful and more powerful, you're in the right place. In this article, we'll show you how Kaufman Rossin customized a dynamic, real-time budgeting app for their needs by taking advantage of Domo's business intelligence (BI) and app development capabilities.

We'll show you the approach so you can do the same: build your own smarter, faster budgeting solution.

Why traditional budget management falls short

Traditional budgeting systems weren't built for the pace of today's business. With traditional budget management, finance teams get stuck in inefficient and frustrating processes. Although experienced, they work with older tools, like static reporting systems, that can't keep up with the dynamic nature and speed of current business demands.

What's missing with these traditional tools? Automation. Scalability. Flexibility. The ability to move fast while maintaining control. As a result, teams struggle to achieve the necessary accuracy, speed, and collaboration they need to succeed.

So, what exactly gets in the way? Let's look at the most common barriers to help us understand why organizations are looking for more flexible solutions.

• Data silos and manual processes: Financial data is often stored in various systems across departments. This causes delays in updating as teams must extract, combine, and sometimes re-enter information from multiple sources. The process is inefficient, prone to errors, and makes maintaining a single, current source of data difficult. ‍
• Limited visibility and collaboration: Traditional budgeting relies on fixed reports that are outdated by the time decision-makers review them. These reports display past data rather than current information, which hinders cross-team alignment and makes collaborative budget adjustments more challenging. For instance, if marketing increases campaign spend but finance reports are days behind, opportunities to adjust strategies proactively are lost. ‍
• Reactive vs proactive management: Traditional budgeting is reactive because organizations often discover budget issues only after they have escalated, lacking real-time visibility. This delays interventions, prevents effective reallocation of funds, and limits proactive financial planning.

If any of that sounds familiar, you're not the only one. These are common headaches, and they're exactly why organizations are searching for more agile, flexible solutions.

What effective budgeting actually looks like

So, what does good budget tracking look like in practice? Features like these help organizations shift from reactive to proactive financial management. Let's look at what makes budget tracking work in today's business environment:

• Real-time data integration: Integrating data seamlessly from systems like payroll, revenue, and expenses keeps budgets accurate and current. This reduces manual reconciliation delays and ensures decisions are based on the latest financial insights. ‍
• Interactive visualization: Interactive dashboards let users engage with their data, view detailed information, filter data easily, and conduct scenario planning. This enables leaders to assess financial impacts quickly and adjust plans with confidence. ‍
• Automated workflows: Built-in approval processes and automated variance alerts streamline oversight and accelerate budget adjustments. Stakeholders are notified immediately if spending deviates from the plan, supporting timely interventions. ‍
• Collaborative features: Modern budgeting systems allow teams to share information and maintain cross-departmental visibility. This way, all stakeholders work from the same trusted data, improving alignment and accountability. ‍
• Scalable architecture: A scalable budgeting system handles expanding data volumes, extra teams, and complex use cases without losing performance or governance standards.

The next section outlines how Kaufman Rossin utilized Domo to develop a custom budgeting app, providing a step-by-step guide to replicate their success.

How to build budget tracking with Domo:

A case study of Kaufman Rossin's budget innovation

Building your own budgeting solution in Domo might sound like a big lift, but you're not alone. Let's break it down together, following the real journey of Kaufman Rossin, as presented at Domopalooza 2025.

At the most-attended breakout session of the conference, Richard Salinas (COO) and Lilia Restrepo (director of business intelligence) shared their practical, proven framework. You can catch the full session replay here, or keep scrolling to see how they hacked the stack.

The duo built built a budgeting app using App Studio that replaced manual, spreadsheet-heavy processes, enabling budget cycle optimization through faster updates and better departmental visibility. Here's how they did it and how you can, too.

▶️ To start, see the end result: Kaufman Rossin's custom budgeting app.

Step 1: Know what you're solving (and why it matters)

Before building any solution, clearly articulate the problem you aim to solve and visualize what success will look like once implemented.

For Kaufman Rossin, issues included budgets being "all over the place," overly manual processes, a lack of granular detail, inefficient collaboration, and limited visibility. They also faced "spreadsheet devils" and "legacy gatekeepers," as well as old systems and deep resistance to change.

As a firm that doubled in size from 300 to over 700 employees and from $70 million to $160 million in revenue, their existing processes couldn't keep up.

They set a clear target: empower department leaders to budget and forecast across multiple levels, track headcount changes (by level, office, department, sub-department, industry), and track expenses with drill-down capabilities. Additionally, they aimed to project revenue by department, region, and office, beyond firm-wide estimates, all in 90 percent less time and with ten times more actionable data.

This clear objective defined the "why" and paved the way for subsequent steps, including data preparation and app development.

▶️ Watch how Kaufman Rossin defined their objective.

Step 2: Get your data house in order

Once you have a clear objective and a vision for your end goal, the next step is to take an inventory of your data and understand what is needed and in what format. This phase is about gathering, cleaning, and transforming your data to make it suitable for your new Domo app.

Extraction (Bring your data together, cleanly and quickly)

You can use Domo's pre-built connectors for seamless integration with a variety of systems, including ERPs, accounting platforms, payroll systems, cloud applications, databases, and flat files (like CSV or Excel). Even custom APIs can be integrated easily. Data can be extracted using various methods:

• Full extraction: Pulling all data from the source, requiring comparison with existing data to identify changes. ‍
• Source-driven extraction: The source system notifies Domo of changes, and only new or modified data is extracted. ‍
• Incremental extraction: This method extracts only the new data and any changes since the last extraction. It improves efficiency and ensures optimal performance for datasets that update frequently.

For Kaufman Rossin, they found that their existing systems lacked friendly APIs, granularity, and user-friendliness. Specifically, they identified ADP for payroll and Expensify for expenses as having limited open-integration capabilities.

They proactively migrated to new core systems: Paycom for payroll and Concur for expenses. They also improved their existing accounting platform, Business Central 365, by activating its "dimensions" feature.

Transformation (Clean it. Map it. Make it work for you.)

After extraction, the raw data transforms to meet the specific structure, quality, and consistency requirements for your budgeting app. Domo facilitates this through powerful tools like Magic ETL (a visual, drag-and-drop interface) and SQL DataFlows for more complex, code-based transformations.

Key transformation operations include:

• Data cleaning: Resolving inconsistencies, handling missing values, and deduplicating records to ensure accuracy. ‍
• Standardization: Reformatting data to a predetermined, consistent format, such as ensuring all date fields follow the same pattern. ‍
• Enrichment: Adding valuable context or calculated fields, like calculating monthly spend based on salary and start date. ‍
• Joining and appending: Combining related data from multiple sources into a single, unified dataset, like linking payroll data with department structures.

With Domo, Magic ETL's visual interface lets you easily define and sequence these operations without extensive coding. SQL DataFlows, on the other hand, provide the flexibility to write custom queries for complex joins, subqueries, and other intricate tasks..

Loading (Prepping your data for showtime)

In the final step, the transformed, clean, and harmonized data is loaded into Domo's centralized data repository. This ensures the data is readily available for your custom budgeting application, dashboards, and reports. Domo's Adrenaline engine optimizes this process for rapid results, making the data accessible for real-time analysis.

Remember to include backend data fields needed for data joins. Even if they're not visible to the end-user in the app interface, these fields are essential for maintaining data integrity and relationships within Domo's data model.

Step 3: Bring your budget app to life

This is where you create the user-facing application. This step involves two main phases:

• Designing the user interface
• Coding the app and adding functionalities

Here's a brief explanation of how Kaufman Rossin approached this step:

Wireframe design (Sketch the blueprint first)

Start by designing the user interface. Even a simple tool like Excel can create an effective wireframe, helping you communicate your needs (such as the number of people, salary, and start date) to your web developer.

▶️ Watch how Lilia describes starting the wireframe process.

Building the app (Bring the design to life)

Custom apps in Domo are built using external software. You or the web developer will also need to be proficient in three key languages:

• HTML: For the structure or "bones" of your app.
• CSS: For the style and appearance (colors, pop-ups). ‍
• JavaScript: For the functionality, logic, and interactivity (e.g., saving data, joining information, button actions).

▶️ See how a web developer brings the app to life.

Build key functionalities (Time to make it do the work)

Kaufman Rossin identified three core inputs for their app: headcount needs, expenses, and revenue.

• Headcount projections: Allow department leaders to input planned hires, including start date, position, department, and sub-department. The app should automatically allocate spend per month based on start dates and allow for downsizing by inputting negative values. Display current headcount, salaries, and average raises, updating automatically from payroll, to inform decisions.

• Expense tracking: Show real-time actuals from the accounting system. Allow leaders to input budgets for controllable expenses, such as sponsorships and travel, while displaying informational costs, including meals and mileage. Use automated allocation based on dimensions configured in your expense system. ‍
• Revenue projections: Enable service line leaders to input productivity percentages and billable hours. The app should filter by sub-department, position, and month, allowing each leader to view only their relevant data. It should account for different revenue cycles and automatically calculate gross and net services based on billable rates. The goal is to provide granular detail with minimal effort from users.

Step 4: Launch, test, tweak...repeat

Once built, the web developer publishes the app into your Domo instance using a tool called Domo CLI (Command-Line Interface). It helps in deploying new apps, updating them, and managing new versions based on feedback or changes.

▶️ See how Kaufman Rossin describes this process.

After deployment, you need to set permissions using PDP (Personalized Data Permissions) to control who can see the app and who can input data. Additionally, you'll need to define the level of data access for different users.

Another critical part of deployment is testing the app thoroughly. Launch it first for a small team or pilot group to identify issues and ensure functionality before a wider release. As Kaufman Rossin experienced, "somebody's going to try to break it."

▶️ Learn how Lilia builds testing into the build process.

Moreover, gathering feedback for future iterations is also important, as it helps you identify additional user needs and refine the app's features and usability over time.

The value of Domo: Smarter budgets, more insight...and less stress

The custom budgeting app delivered remarkable results. Kaufman Rossin achieved a 90 percent reduction in time spent on budgeting, while simultaneously gaining significantly more detailed information than was possible with manual processes. The app also allowed for drilling down into specific details and seamless integration with other dashboards.

This case study highlights how Domo empowers teams and companies to become more efficient in countless ways. We aim to help you find a new Domo use case in your organization by guiding you through the Kaufman Rossin process, specifically for budgeting challenges.

Want to learn more? Watch the Domopalooza session to see the entire implementation process and explore how Domo's App Studio helps in building a budget tracking solution.

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