Our Story

The concept of a web-based budgeting system began somewhere in the 1990’s in the mind of Tom Olson who was, at the time, Associate Superintendent of Business and Finance at Parkland School Division in Alberta, Canada. The challenges and frustrations accompanying school budgeting were pretty much the same then as they are now, and so many of them seemed to be associated with the use of spreadsheets… they are cumbersome and unreliable, they represent isolated pieces of budget information, and they do not pull the organization together.

So the spreadsheet was the irritation that pestered Olson until it ultimately inspired him to become the architect of a new concept in budgeting. He invited Brad Mastaler, a software architect in the education field to collaborate with him using technology to create a new budget reality… beyond spreadsheets. (OR in which the spreadsheet would be a thing of the past.)

Fueled by excitement about the possibilities and by early successes, the twosome grew to a team of individuals who worked through months that became years. The fruit of Olson’s experience in the field and of the team’s talent and persistence is today’s web-based version of MBF, the 21st Century solution to the challenges of school budgeting.