Aplos

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile: Fairly clean interface. Most reports are close to what I want.

Nachteile: It's still buggy. Amounts that should match, don't always. The cost has tripled in the last 3 years.

Kommentare: The people at APLOS are great to work with. Easy to reach out to, quick to respond, They are really good at listening to my particular need and showing me how APLOS helps with it vs. just a generic response. Also, you can't beat the price. (I got a Black Friday 50% off special for a year). I looked at other options - some were too much for my need (both cost and complexity) and some could be made to work (Quickbooks for example) but were not really designed for a church. This is PERFECT for us.

Vorteile: I purchased this software to help me take on a new role as treasurer of a small church. Am about 6 weeks into a "practice period" and will wipe out my practice data and start clean in January. It has (almost) everything I could want and some things I did not expect. The people database for church members, vendors, & prospects supports communication and there are robust accounting features (budgeting, bill pay, offerings, etc.). It has predesigned reports of all kinds that can be easily customized. You can import and export data. And it is really easy to use. Clearly designed for non-professionals like me - a volunteer doing a treasurer's job. Loved it from the first time I started playing with it during the free trial period. Also the resources (webinars, academy, one on one support) are great! Have watched several webinars, and chatted with people in customer support several times to get specific guidance/suggestions on my questions.

Nachteile: Have found only 2 things missing so far: 1) My pastor wants the ability to use the letter/email functions to communicate with members (uses the contact database) without seeing their donation records - and right now that "separation" isn't available. Also in recording donations, I would like to differentiate between cash and check because you need that info to make your bank deposit. APLOS doesn't provide for that. There's a workaround but not a great one. Customer Service made note of both of these needs for future releases.

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile: 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.

Nachteile: 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.

Kommentare: 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

Kommentare: Overall, this is the best software for the money and I highly recommend it both for the product and the customer service.

Vorteile: 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.

Nachteile: 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.