Presented by: Angela Matthes, Chief Financial Officer at United Way of Salt Lake and Srikar Chinam, Founder & CEO of KarmaSuite
United Way of Salt Lake’s Chief Financial Officer Angela Matthes joined KarmaSuite Founder & CEO Srikar Chinam to present a demo titled “AI-Powered Payroll Allocations to Maximize Grant Utilization” at the 2026 AICPA & CIMA Not-for-Profit Industry Conference in Washington D.C. They shared strategies for utilizing KarmaSuite’s advanced algorithms and AI tools to automate personnel allocation decisions and ensure grant funds are used fully and strategically.
Session Overview
Not-for-profit finance teams manually maintain complex spreadsheets to allocate employee salaries across multiple grants, constantly recalculating percentages whenever staff turn over, new grants are awarded, or existing grants approach expiration — all while juggling constraints such as remaining funds, budget caps, and funder restrictions. When these allocations fall behind, the result is chronic underspending that leads to last-minute fire drills to spend grant funds, requests for no-cost extensions, or, in the worst case, leaving money on the table. In this session, we demonstrate how KarmaSuite uses advanced algorithms and AI to automate personnel allocation decisions, determining the optimal distribution of each employee’s time and salary across grants. This approach transforms what is typically an error-prone, time-intensive process into one that adapts dynamically as organizational conditions change, ensuring grants are fully and strategically utilized.
The demo was designed to achieve the following objectives:
- Identify the risks of managing employee-to-grant salary allocations through manual spreadsheets, including how outdated allocations lead to underspending, last-minute spending fire drills, extension requests, and unspent grant funds.
- Apply AI-driven optimization tools to automate personnel allocation across multiple grants based on funding availability, budget constraints, and grant restrictions, maximizing grant utilization.
About United Way of Salt Lake’s Finance Expert
Angela Matthes, United Way of Salt Lake Chief Financial Officer, brings 16 years of experience in financial roles, primarily within startup environments, including software, lead generation, filmmaking, biomedical, and nonprofit companies/institutions. She holds an MS in Finance and a Six Sigma black belt.
