For charities, churches and nonprofits, tracking and receipting your donations, not to mention the rest of your finances, can seem like an onerous task.
Cooperstock Software, through its products found at www.software4nonprofits.com, helps small to mid-sized churches, charities and nonprofits with their financial recording and reporting, with our two programs for Windows:
DONATION: Tracks donors and donations and issues charitable receipts
ACCOUNTS: Bookkeeping, including simple and completely automatic fund accounting.
This all started in the early 1990’s when I was the Treasurer for my Quaker Meeting and I bought us a commercial program for what DONATION now does, called ChurchMouse. Unfortunately, after a couple of years it started falling apart, losing data, and doing unfortunate things like allowing a donor with donations to be deleted, but leaving the donations there, owned by nobody! Being an experienced programmer, I realized I could write something much more professional and solid, and DONATION was born.
The first version of DONATION was a DOS program used only by my Quaker Meeting. When I re-wrote it for Windows in 1999, I started giving it away for free, under FreeDonationSoftware.org. I finally decided to make it commercial in 2007, and I created Software4Nonprofits.com as its new home.
ACCOUNTS was born in 2012, after years of resisting writing a bookkeeping program that would have to compete with Intuit’s QuickBooks and Quicken. More and more of our DONATION users were asking for something comparably simple and affordable, that handled fund accounting properly, so I finally gave in and created ACCOUNTS.
We currently have over 7,000 registered users of DONATION, and over 1,000 registered users of ACCOUNTS.
Why Choose Software4Nonprofits?
Our goal is to be as simple as possible to use, yet powerful, and extremely affordable. We have lots of users who tell us “I’m not very good with computers” but who still find they can use the programs. They also appreciate our responsive support, and comprehensive help files.
We regularly have users switch to our programs from other programs that have been discontinued (for example Membership Plus users switching to DONATION), or that are too expensive and complex.
Features
Of course, there are many more features in the programs than are indicated in the brief summaries above!
Details for DONATION are at www.software4nonprofits.com/features.htm, and for ACCOUNTS at www.software4nonprofits.com/accounts/features.htm.
Some significant features include:
- lots of built-in reports, custom reports, and memorized reports in both programs
- appropriate receipts for the U.S.A., Canada (including all of the Canada Revenue Agency’s complex requirements), Australia and New Zealand
- receipts can be printed or emailed as PDFs
- many importing features in DONATION, to avoid re-entering data when you first start using it, including for donors and donations from Excel or text files, and direct imports from several other programs including Membership Plus and GiftWorks
- importing of charts of accounts in ACCOUNTS from QuickBooks, Quicken, and Simply Accounting
- a Bank Deposits feature in DONATION that can export summary deposit transactions to ACCOUNTS
- memorized and recurring transactions in ACCOUNTS
- various special features for churches in DONATION, such as envelope numbers, batch entry for collections, and a limited user password for counters or tellers
- mail-merge letters in DONATION, plus the option to use a mail-merge version of the receipts if you need to add your own wording to them
- linking of accounts in ACCOUNTS to lines on government forms, with related reporting to make filling in those forms easier
DONATION is not trying to be either a full-featured church management program or a full-featured fundraising program – which keeps it simple and focused!
Fund Accounting in ACCOUNTS
The big “win” in ACCOUNTS comes if you need fund accounting. That is when you have various funds, with running balances that you need to track, and income and expenses associated with those funds.
In traditional bookkeeping programs like QuickBooks, it is extremely difficult to keep fund balances up to date in the program. Users often have to resort to awkward and error-prone work-arounds like sub-bank accounts to indicate fund balances, occasional journal entries to update the fund balances, or even independent spreadsheets to track those balances.
In ACCOUNTS, the fund balances are always automatically completely up to date. Each income and expense account is linked to one fund, and every transaction using those accounts automatically updates the fund balance.
Fund Income Statement reports show the income and expenses for each fund, followed by the starting fund balance for the period, the amount of changes due to the net income and any explicit inter-fund transfers, and the ending fund balance for the period. There is no way to get such an obviously helpful report like that out of a conventional program like QuickBooks that doesn’t have fund accounting concepts built into it!
Pricing
One of our principles is being very transparent about our pricing (and everything else!).
Both programs can be downloaded, installed and evaluated for free for 60 days.
Full pricing information is at www.software4nonprofits.com/pricing.htm for DONATION and www.software4nonprofits.com/accounts/pricing.htm for ACCOUNTS.
Specific purchase prices as of 2018:
DONATION:
- Feature-limited Lite version: free (optional $20 fee for a year of support)
- Full-featured versions: $100
- Versions that support up to 5 simultaneous users: $180
ACCOUNTS:
- Full-featured versions: $130
- Versions that support up to 5 simultaneous users: $220
The purchase prices include a year of support and upgrades.
In the 2nd and subsequent years you can pay an Annual Renewal fee of ½ the purchase price for your version, for another year of support and upgrades.
You can have multiple databases for multiple organization in each program, except for the Lite version of DONATION.
Versions of the Programs
All versions of the two programs are installed Windows programs. The Lite version of DONATION and Standalone versions of both programs are installed on your computer, with their database also on your computer.
Local Network versions of the programs are for use on multiple computers within one network (generally one building or set of offices), with the database on one of those computers. Web Network versions of the programs are for use on computers connected over the Internet, and have their databases stored on our servers rather than your computers.
There are several different ways to share one database between multiple users, even with the Standalone version. These options are detailed online and in the programs’ help.
Users Love the Programs!
We are always delighted at how often users tell us that they love the program, and how much better it is than what they were doing before, whether that was manual, Excel, or a different program.
You can see some great user reactions on our Testimonials pages, www.software4nonprofits.com/testimonials.htm for DONATION or www.software4nonprofits.com/accounts/testimonials.htm for ACCOUNTS. The DONATION page also has a link to lots of reviews on the independent site Capterra.
We invite you to try the free 60-day evaluations of the programs, and hope you will love them as much as the existing users do! You can get to everything on the site by starting from the home page, www.software4nonprofits.com.
- Dan Cooperstock, Owner, (416) 423-7722, info@software4nonprofits.com