8 Best Nonprofit Accounting Software to Watch Out For

Selecting a dedicated accounting solution can help you prioritize tasks and stay on top of your organization’s needs.

As the finance manager or accountant in a nonprofit organization, you must have faced the challenge of selecting the right accounting solution for your nonprofit’s needs. A common reason for this challenge is that organizations like yours have specific accounting needs that traditional accounting tools are unable to meet.

To support processes such as donor management, grants and fund management, and creating budgets and financial reports for every expense, you need a dedicated tool tailor-made for accounting at nonprofits.

Keeping that in mind, we’ve created this article featuring the eight best nonprofit accounting software tools to help make your research hassle-free (the products are listed alphabetically).

See our selection methodology here.

AccuFund Accounting Suite is a cloud-based financial reporting and nonprofit accounting system. The tool provides advanced reporting capabilities and customized dashboards for tracking funds, managing cash receipts, and reconciling bank accounts.

AccuFund Accounting Suite also helps you allocate expenses, create invoices, and distribute budgets across different departments. It also provides a feature called budget development with which department managers can enter and develop budgets for fiscal and grant years.

Additionally, the tool features a payroll suite to manage employee salaries and help them with tax management.

Features:

• Tracking grant-related data, report due dates, contacts, contracts, and scheduled tasks.
• Program management and event hosting on one platform.
• Expense allocation, invoice creation, account reconciliations, and budget distribution.

Pricing:

• AccuFund users pay $2,995 as a one-time payment. It’s advisable to contact their sales team for additional information regarding the pricing.

Adaptive Planning by Workday is an enterprise tool for budgeting, planning, and reporting. The tool serves a wide variety of businesses including small companies and nonprofit organizations. The tool helps improve the alignment of resources, funding, and services and increases visibility into your organization’s expenses.

With Adaptive Planning, you can plan and forecast your budgeting by program, project, fund, grant, season, and even location. The tool also helps you track expenses and donor contributions efficiently.

With an easy-to-use reporting feature, you can generate balance sheets and annual financial statements to track the overall financial performance of your organization.

Features:

• Continuous forecast for predictable fund management.
• Real-time and efficient reporting on funds and projects.
• Donor contributions, personnel costs, and overhead modeling and analysis.

Pricing:

• Adaptive Planning offers customized pricing based on your requirements. You can contact their sales team to get a quote.

Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT is a cloud-based accounting software tool specifically designed for nonprofit and government organizations to meet their accounting needs.

As a finance manager, you can budget into the future, prioritize expenditure, and compare various fiscal years to assess funding needs. The tool also helps eliminate manual transaction processes while making sure that your organization’s spending policies are applied and enforced.

The tool manages financial reporting, monitors and tracks program success, and also supports fundraising efforts.

Features:

• Financial planning, reporting, budgeting, and analysis.
• Policy management and internal organizational control.
• Grant accounting and tracking transactions.

Pricing:

• Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT offers customized pricing based on your requirements. You can contact their sales team to get a quote.

Denali Fund by Cougar Mountain Software is an accounting solution for nonprofit organizations, with a special focus on fund accounting and fraud prevention. The tool features a full suite of accounting modules that enable true fund accounting, grant and donor management, interactive KPI reports, and custom reporting, among others.

Cougar Mountain Software also offers the Denali BI, a solution that tracks all your KPIs in real-time with the help of predictive analytics and artificial intelligence-based pulse rates.

The tool comes in three tiers: Denali Basecamp, Ascent, and Summit. Each tier offers additional features that cover bank reconciliation, auditing, payroll management, and tax forms.

Features:

• Fraud detection and prevention.
• Data visualization with Denali BI.
• Grant and donor management.

Pricing:

• Denali Fund starts at $999 as a one-time payment. It’s advisable to contact their sales team for additional information regarding the pricing.

FastFund is a comprehensive nonprofit accounting, fundraising, and payroll software solution. With this tool, you can record cash, pledge, and in-kind donations; send acknowledgment letters; and pledge receivable statements.

The tool helps you track all the stakeholders you deal with, whether they are donors, members, alumni, vendors, or employees. FastFund accounting also provides a campaign management facility that helps your organization keep a track of all its fund-raising activities.

Additionally, the software solution generates comprehensive reports detailing donations and the impact of events throughout the fiscal year.

Features:

• Cash, pledge, and in-kind donation management.
• Membership management.
• Automated receipts and report generation.

Pricing:

• FastFund Accounting starts at $42 per month, FastFund Fundraising starts at $20 per month, and FastFund Payroll starts at $66 per month.

Fund EZ is an accounting software made for nonprofits that have a limited budget. Its features include general ledger, bank reconciliation, budgeting, accounts payable and receivable, fund allocation, and secure data storage.

Fund EZ offers an easy-to-use interface to simplify bookkeeping and create helpful reports that help audit and finance teams identify potential fraud and theft.

The tool also offers an add-on called Fund EZ PRO that features a nonprofit chart of accounts that tracks programs, funding sources, grants, sites, and departments, helping your team to better organize clients and donors.

Features:

• User-definable chart of accounts.
• Custom reporting.
• Company and department consolidation.

Pricing:

• Fund EZ starts at $170 per user, per month. For add-ons, you can contact the Fund EZ sales team to get a customized quote. You can also visit their website and schedule a demo.

MIP Fund Accounting is a fund accounting solution designed to meet the needs of nonprofit organizations. The tool helps drive donor engagement, generate greater returns, and make your nonprofit accounting team more efficient.

The nonprofit accounting solution offers features such as fund accounting, online fundraising, event fundraising, and donor management. It helps your nonprofit organization with overall financial management.

The software tool also features a donor management system that enables you to understand your donors, build relationships, and effectively tailor offline and online communication to obtain more donations.

Features:

• Fund accounting.
• Online and event fundraising.
• Donor management.

Pricing:

• MIP Fund Accounting offers customized pricing based on your requirements. You can visit the vendor website to contact the sales team to get a quote for the software solution.

QuickBooks Online Advanced is an accounting solution that helps you organize bookkeeping, prioritize and complete budgeting tasks, and stay on top of your organization’s cash flow.

The software solution features a cash flow dashboard that provides clear financial insights into where each penny goes. You can also create user roles to manage access to your nonprofit’s sensitive information.

QuickBooks Online Advanced also provides a smart reporting feature that analyzes KPIs that matter the most to your grant and fund management requirements.

Features:

• Chart of accounts for greater visibility.
• Expenses and transactions dashboard.
• Reporting and insights into every organization and individual activity.

Pricing:

• Pricing for QuickBooks Online Advanced starts at $25 per month. They also offer a 30-day free trial.

Is your nonprofit looking for a dedicated solution?

Nonprofits face unique challenges when it comes to accounting so it’s only natural to go for a dedicated nonprofit accounting solution. Luckily, Capterra’s Nonprofit Technology blog is a fantastic resource for finding software and tech solutions tailor-made for your organization.

This article was updated on May 31, 2021. Products considered for this article had to:

• Meet our nonprofit accounting software market definition:
  Nonprofit Accounting software helps non-commercial organizations track grants and donations and report on how these funds are being spent. (Source)
• Offers the mentioned features of nonprofit accounting solutions: Fund accounting, grant management, and donor management.

Software that met the market definition and feature requirements also needed a minimum of 25 user-submitted reviews and an overall user rating of 4.2 or above compared to other products in the category. All the products selected for this article were picked from our category page after careful consideration.