Aplos Accounting is a web-based accounting software, aimed at non-profit organisations and their accountants, which includes tools for fund accounting, budgeting, bill tracking and payment, invoicing, and financial reporting.
With Aplos’ fund accounting capabilities, users can create unlimited fund accounts to track money designated for specific purposes, including grants, campaigns, and building funds. Users are able to produce budgets for 1 to 3 years, for their total income and expenses or on a per-fund basis, and compare their budgets to actual accounting for the year.
Aplos will host an unlimited number of donation pages for different projects or funds, customized to reflect users’ organizations. Through these, donors can manage their giving, with the option to schedule weekly or monthly recurring donations. Aplos automatically thanks donors for their gift on behalf of the organization, and sends them email receipts for their records. Users can manage online and offline donations, recording both the donor and purpose of the contribution to create a full donation record, and identify recurring donors and their donation amounts.
Aplos includes multiple FASB standard reports, such as balance sheets, income statements, and fund balances, and allows users to create custom reports by tracking project and campaign income and expenses using tags. Contribution statements of all tax-deductible donations are automatically generated for each donor, removing the need for users to manually create these.
Avantages
I like that everything is all together in one spot - donor software, accounting, newletters and online giving forms. I like how when someone gives online through your forms that it automatically incorporates into your accounting and saves info from the giver into your contacts.
Their customer service and support is their beacon of light. Extreme strong point. It's almost as if you have nonprofit accountant on your staff to answer your questions. They answer you quickly, and their answers are always helpful. And often times they've logged in and completely helped me fix an issue. This is the best thing I love about them and something that makes them completely unique. This was a game changer for me as a brand new nonprofit and didn't know what I was doing. I can't say enough about this! This is what makes me recommend them to everyone I know that's a nonprofit leader.
Inconvénients
The newsletter email templates and online giving forms are very template-y and don't give you a lot of control. The final product can help you get information out, however it looks pretty amateurish, which in turn makes your nonprofit/your brand, look amateurish - which is more important than most people know. If Aplos could follow constant contact's lead on design formatting they would be top notch.
The other thing I don't like is often I'm fundraising for events and have options for customers to pick (example : I want to buy tickets for an event and a tshirt for two people), or want them to be able to buy multiples of items and it really needs somewhat of a "cart" option for online giving forms.
Third, I get lots of complaints from customers about the transaction errors which make it hard to give. I get this a lot. Which can hinder givers, often they won't go back again and give again when they get an email way later that the transaction didn't go through, so you lose donations. I've addressed this with them several times, but there hasn't been any resolution. I think it has to do with that the provider they use does a micro-transaction to the bank and then banks don't approve it.
Aplos is doing the job for me. Some things are frustrating, but mostly, it's better than doing things by hand or by spreadsheet. Occasionally odd things happen. For instance, it's now January 17, and the home page is telling me that my YTD income is different from my monthly income. This can't be true in January. Similar things happen in some reports. The balance sheet will say that a fund has X dollars, but the report for that fund will say Y dollars. So there are some quirks to get around, but it's no worse than making a spreadsheet (or other software that knows nothing about fund accounting) behave. I like the reports Aplos generates. Especially at the end of the year, when everyone in our congregation wants a statement for their taxes. It's really just one button. If I were the boss of Aplos, the first thing I'd change is that I'd clean up the wasted screen real-estate. There's a button on the bottom right that has a bad habit of covering half the number I want to see, and pop-up "alerts" occasionally disrupt my work. And the box the pop-ups come from is also wasted screen area. Actually, this box keeps telling me I'm 85% set up. It's wrong. I'm as set up as I want to be. I can't see how to make the box go away, except to buy more product which I don't need. This amounts to a pop-up ad, and not the good kind. So this isn't a glowing review. But software nowadays is written so poorly, that bare competence floats to the top. Aplos is better than anything else I've used, but that's not saying a lot. If they raise the price again, I'm going back to spreadsheets.
Avantages
Fairly clean interface. Most reports are close to what I want.
Inconvénients
It's still buggy. Amounts that should match, don't always. The cost has tripled in the last 3 years.
Hi Bart,
If the numbers are off by a few dollars, this may be due to rounding. If you¿d like, our Support Team would be happy to look into this to give you a more specific answer. Please feel free to reach out to our Support Team at [email protected]
For the Setup alert:
You can click on the Go To Setup button and choose some of the options like, I don¿t want to set Starting Balances. Or, there are feature options that you can say ¿no¿ to, like Contributions. This should help clear that alert.
Also, sorry that the bottom right icon is a bit pesky. We want you to be able to contact our Support Team if you ever have questions, so that¿s why it¿s there, but we realize that it can sometimes get in the way. That¿s a suggestion that we¿re happy to pass along to our development team.
The Aplos Team
We began using Aplos as a brand new church. They helped us every step of the way as we grew - absolutely stellar customer service! We still don't have the complexity that some larger churches do, but every time we have needed to add something, the capacity has been there. The one exception was the lack of payroll integration, which I understand that they are now adding but we have not used yet. What I love about the product is that it is easy for us who are new to accounting to use, but also robust enough that our treasure (CPA) is able to use it in more complex ways.
Avantages
Cloud-based Accounting with multiple user accounts makes it easy to keep finances updated.
Clean, simple, straight-forward layout makes use easy.
Super-responsive customer service are always there when you need them.
Bank integration makes it easy to import transactions.
Contact management.
Reports are quick and easy to generate with customized data.
Ability to connect to online-giving.
Inconvénients
At the moment we are unable to link families within the contact management system.
There are awesome graphs and charts on the dashboard, but unfortunately they do not have a lot of customization options or the ability to easily export.
If you are busy with the stuff that your non-profit is about, and accounting for the organisation is a necessary dragon, then Aplos will be your knight in shining armor to slay it!
Having implemented a number of other products for small organisations in the past (Quickbooks, Xero, Sage, MS Dynamics GP) I have to give the award for easiest, quickest & most readily accepted to Aplos. If you want to account for your Funds discretely (separate pots of income) then Aplos just works!
Took about an hour to sign up and set up a sandbox (using the trial license) to represent the way my small organisation works - I uncovered a couple of desirable features for product development (see later) but within another 30 minutes I had reports and analysis that would do the job for us so much better than my grumpy accountant! - I showed the software to a user who, after a 5 minute demo, needed no more explanation and was able to enter transactions with multiple expense lines each separately analysed by fund.
The user interface is clearly the 'killer' feature - it is so intuitive that I wonder why others didn't think of it (why didn't I think of it?). The transaction input process for most accounting products is the 'ugly baby' of the product - in Aplos it's the wonder child!
Some caveats to bring this back to earth...
a) The product is currently for the North American market - needs additional features to make it more readily accepted in UK/Europe:
1. Needs a parameterised currency symbol (we don't do dollars!) - but the easy export of reports allows replacement of currency symbol in Excel.
2. Online donations (a great feature!) require a US Bank Account
3. Needs Paypal integration
4. UK giving sites like justgiving.com are very common - integration needed
b) Many grant funders want a full budget before grant - we then need to account against the budget elements (e.g. £500 for travel + £5000 for salary). Aplos currently doesn't budget by Fund element (just at Fund level) but the Income Report provides a full breakdown by expense for each Fund (so allowing manual comparison).
The free support provided by Aplos is responsive and helpful and I am assured that most of these features are on future development plans.
I'm just going to go ahead and sign up for the paid version - I need this software so that I can get on with the purpose of our Charity!!
Terry Wilcox
Project Director
In2Out
www.in2out.org.uk
Overall, this is the best software for the money and I highly recommend it both for the product and the customer service.
Avantages
The set up and functionality of the software is wonderfully easy. I've been using it for a little over a year and the security of having it all online and not having to worry about backups or workstation failures is great. Report flexibility is fantastic. I can create any report for any time period with ease. The customer service people are generally very helpful and on the rare occasion that a question doesn't get answered, the second attempt is always successful. But, it's rare to have to call back.
Inconvénients
The only problem is that the donor statements are not posted from any screen other than the contributions screen. You cannot effect the donor statement from A/R, A/P or AJE's. You must then prepare a deposit and mark it to NOT post to the system. While this is a small inconvenience, it is not highlighted in the tutorials and takes a couple head scratching hours to figure out when first using the software. Once understood, it's a simple workaround.
15-day free trial, no credit card required.
Starter - $30/month
Standard - $45/month
Advanced - $150/month
40% discount for new and small nonprofits.
Voici quelques-unes des questions fréquentes sur Aplos Accounting.
Types de licences disponibles pour Aplos Accounting :
À partir de: $30/mois
Type de licence: Abonnement
version d'essai gratuite: Disponible
15-day free trial, no credit card required.
Starter - $30/month
Standard - $45/month
Advanced - $150/month
40% discount for new and small nonprofits.
Fonctionnalités du logiciel Aplos Accounting :
Utilisateurs habituels du logiciel Aplos Accounting :
Entreprises de taille moyenne, Organismes à but non lucratif, PME
Langues dans lesquelles Aplos Accounting est disponible :
anglais
Types de licences disponibles pour Aplos Accounting:
Abonnement
Nous n'avons pas d'informations sur les appareils pris en charge par Aplos Accounting.
Applications s'intégrant à Aplos Accounting :
Gusto, Gusto
Ressources d'aide disponibles pour Aplos Accounting :
Support en ligne, Support téléphonique, Tutoriels vidéo
