A Better QuickBooks Alternative for Nonprofits

FastFund is built specifically for nonprofit fund accounting, grant tracking, budgeting, reporting, payroll, and fundraising, while QuickBooks is general-purpose accounting software that often requires nonprofit workarounds.

QuickBooks for Nonprofits is essentially the same program as the regular version of QuickBooks. The only difference is customers are called donors, sales receipts are called donation receipts and accounts receivable is called pledge receivable.

QuickBooks for Nonprofits still has the same limitations when it comes to fund accounting.The following was taken directly from the QuickBooks support site in response to an FAQ about tracking funds using classes in QuickBooks: Important: The Balance Sheet by Class report is an advanced report that differs from other QuickBooks reports. Specifically, QuickBooks calculates the class allocations for the report each time you run the report. Because of this, you may experience some unexpected results.

Understanding and fixing these results requires a strong background in accounting and a good working knowledge of QuickBooks. Only use this report if you need a balance sheet broken down by class. Potential Problems: Net incomes differ between the Balance Sheet by Class and Profit & Loss by Class reports. The Balance Sheet by Class report makes calculations to balance a transaction’s classes. In some cases, this causes the net income for a class on the Profit & Loss by Class report to differ from the net income for that same class on the Balance Sheet by Class report.

Yes. FastFund helps nonprofits track restricted and unrestricted funds, grants, programs, projects, and budgets without relying on spreadsheets or manual tracking.

Yes. Araize provides onboarding, training videos, and migration support to help nonprofits move from QuickBooks or spreadsheets to FastFund.

QuickBooks is the most used accounting software on the market, but unfortunately QuickBooks doesn’t do fund accounting. Lots of accountants will recommend using classes in Quickbooks to get the segregation of financial activity a nonprofit needs for funds, functional areas, programs, funding sources, grants, etc.

But, in QuickBooks, you get two data elements, Account and Class for coding transactions, and this severely limits reporting. Jobs is a third data element, but is not universally available in the QuickBooks report structure. If your organization requires reporting on more than two dimensions, QuickBooks simply can’t handle it and a majority of financial reporting must be done outside the system in spreadsheets, which can create internal control deficiencies.

Yes. FastFund offers integrated accounting, payroll, and fundraising modules so nonprofits can manage financial and donor data in one system.

No. FastFund Online is a modular system, so you can choose the modules that address your most important needs. By combining accounting, fundraising and payroll in one solution with one database, FastFund Online eliminates the headaches of trying to export and import data from different systems. This will save you time when trying to reconcile data, and improve office efficiency, which saves you money.

Nonprofit fund accounting presents many challenges too tedious to be handled using outdated spreadsheets and off-the-shelf software. If you find yourself spending several hours fiddling with spreadsheets and struggling to generate required reports for your auditors, then you are ready for FastFund’s affordable and simple nonprofit software. At the heart of the system is an intuitive chart of accounts design that does all the heavy lifting to track both financial and operational data in real time. With FastFund Online, your nonprofit can become more accountable and fulfill your mission.

Yes, there are no long term contracts to use FastFund Online. You can pay on a monthly basis and cancel anytime. But, if you prepay for a year, you get one month free and can still cancel anytime and get a pro-rated refund.

Your licensing fee includes free, unlimited telephone and email support and ongoing upgrades. We also offer monthly training webinars and online video training to get you up and running fast.

Yes. FastFund is a secure cloud-based SaaS platform that can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.