I became the treasurer for a local charity at the end of last year. We currently use Quicken for accounts, but I’m not finding it entirely satisfactory, we can’t find the installation disc, and I understand it isn’t supported in the UK anymore, so I’m considering replacing it with a new package, preferably freeware, but we could consider a reasonably priced commercial product. Hopefully you can give me some ideas to consider. I’ve tried searching, but I get so many hits its difficult to know where to start, and most seem to be for personal accounts.
There are 2 bank accounts, and petty cash to manage. We don’t really need much in the way of purchase ledger, and we don’t have sales, so we don’t need a sales ledger. Support for managing different sources of funding would be useful. We need the ability to allocate expenses and income to categories, and split a cheque between different categories. We don’t really have much in the way of non-cash assets.
Also, I need to produce reports. Mainly this is monthly income and expense reports for the board, and yearly accounts, but other reports, or the ability to customize reports would be useful. I’m currently having to export into Excel in order to remove some of the subcategories I don’t need.
It would be useful to be able to have different users. The day-to-day entries would be made by staff, so it would be good to keep track of who made what entries. Also some form of audit trail would be useful. It would also be nice if I could work on the accounts at home, and then add any changes to the version at the office when I come in, if at all possible.
The system should be user-friendly enough for the staff to still do the day-to-day entries, while I can do the reports, bank reconciliation, and things like that.
As an alternative, software that can take QIF files and produce reports from them might also be useful.