Best Accounting Software for Nonprofits...not too expensive and a great tool to keep track of finances!
August 29, 2014

Best Accounting Software for Nonprofits...not too expensive and a great tool to keep track of finances!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions

We use QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions for our small trade association and there are two of us that use it. I'm the administrator and our bookkeeper uses it on a daily basis. It's used for all our financial reporting, banking and we recently started using it to process credit cards for the first time last year.
  • It's user friendly which makes it easy to teach someone how to use the basic features.
  • Many nonprofit agencies tend to use QuickBooks so I like that it uses language that nonprofits use. For instance, you can use one chart of accounts and use classes or categories to track different programs or events.
  • You can have two company files open at once which is great if you're trying to compare data between the two.
  • We use their Payment Network which basically allows our customers to pay online with a credit card. It's worked great except that we thought we could use it with more than one bank account. Only after we sent out invoices, did we realize this which caused us to have to transfer funds between two different bank accounts. I had to call the QuickBooks support to clear it up but it never said anywhere that you could only use one bank account at a time.
  • Also, something else is that the Payment Network does not tie into any of the event registration software that we use which means we can't have them pay directly into our account. We have to first invoice our customers and on the invoice is a link to the payment network that is tied to that invoice.
  • Tracking employee leave time (sick and vacation) has always been an issue for as long as I've been using QuickBooks. There have been times when it has not taken off vacation from the overall total even though it's coded as vacation on the paycheck. We just use a separate Excel spreadsheet to track the actual amount.
  • Better monthly financial reports for our board of directors.
  • It has given our customers/members an easy way to pay for things online with the Payment Network (which does cost extra). And it's great because their payments get downloaded directly into QuickBooks and there is no double entry of data. Plus we don't have to take anyone's credit card information.
  • Has helped us keep track of one of our grants and is easy to pull reports from which save us time.
Haven't use any other accounting system, only QuickBooks.
We'll renew because we know how to use it and I have enough experience to troubleshoot when our bookkeeper has a problem. And it's a good product that I think fits our needs perfectly!
I think it's great for nonprofits - even the less expensive versions of QuickBooks. This version might actually be too advanced for most nonprofits since you aren't tracking inventory or items like a retail company might do so why pay more when you don't need all those extra perks. You will want to decide whether to pay for a payroll subscription or not. It's very handy for us and does our direct deposit; which is nice not having to deal with printing checks - so I think its worth the extra cost.