Base is an artist-led nonprofit in South Seattle, supporting risk and invention in dance, performance, and multidisciplinary art. The team is run entirely by working artists. For years, that meant they were often stuck in cycles of financial catch-up. Mazlo changed that, replacing a disconnected mix of banking, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks with one real-time system. Now the team has more confidence, more calm, and more creative ownership over its financial life.
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less reconciliation time
bookkeeping backlog eliminated
transactions auto-synced to QuickBooks
Base is run by artists, for artists. From the beginning, everyone on the team has also been a working artist. For most of the organization's first decade, the team made do with disconnected systems. They used a community bank, an outside bookkeeper, QuickBooks, and other tools that did not work together easily.
Reconciliation took hours. Over time, their bookkeeper fell several months behind. That meant answers to important financial questions were delayed too. Year-end reviews became stressful, all-hands projects. Catching up meant exporting bank data, cleaning it by hand, uploading it into QuickBooks, and asking teammates about purchases from months earlier.
As Dayna Hanson, Executive Director of Base, put it:
“It definitely felt like, well, nobody likes QuickBooks online. Nobody likes reconciling. Nobody likes any aspects of accounting. That was the impression we had. And so we just sort of made do.”
For an artist-led team, the cost was not only operational. The stress of managing finances was taking energy away from the creative work the team had built the organization to support.
After hearing about Mazlo from another artist, Dayna reached out. For the first time, finance became collaborative, visible, and manageable. It no longer felt like a separate administrative burden disconnected from the organization's creative work.
Spend requests are now shared across the team. Anyone who needs to pay an artist, request funding, or make a purchase can do it accurately in Mazlo, with built-in review. Mazlo's QuickBooks Online integration removed the manual exporting and uploading that used to define month-end. Transactions now flow directly into QuickBooks.
What used to take hours now takes minutes.
“Mazlo gives me more confidence. It reduces the anxiety around finances and accounting in a way that allows me, as the primary fundraiser, to feel much more calm and confident in the development work I need to do. Because it's all at my fingertips, in such an elegant design.”
— Dayna Hanson, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Base
But the biggest change is how the team relates to finance. The numbers are no longer a quarterly scramble to get through. They are, as Dayna put it, “the story of this organization as it unfolds.”
With Mazlo, Base moved from financial catch-up to real-time clarity.
When Base lost its bookkeeper mid-transition, Dayna stepped in herself. For a time, she had to export, clean, and upload financial data by hand. Once the Mazlo-to-QuickBooks integration went live, that work disappeared.
The integration restored weekly financial hygiene the team had never been able to maintain before. The custom chart of accounts also became a small revelation. Rather than forcing the organization into QuickBooks' default categories, Mazlo helped Base build a financial structure that mirrored the org's actual programs: its residencies, its space rentals, its public-facing events.
And in day-to-day operations, finance has become genuinely collaborative. For a team currently running an active community-driven fundraising campaign and expanding into more public-facing programs, that calm confidence at the core of operations matters more than ever.
Base is an artist-led nonprofit in South Seattle whose mission is to elevate risk and invention in dance performance and multidisciplinary art. The organization operates a 2,000-square-foot flexible performance space and runs an immersive paid residency program for artists in Seattle and across the country.