QuickBooks for Nonprofits: Track Fund Accounting

by Lynnea Bylund on October 9, 2010 · 1 comment

Source: Ruth Perryman | FinanceToolbox

Question: Non-profit wants to run 3 levels of membership, plus microloans and fund accounting – Can this all be done with QuickBooks?   One of my concerns is also having an easy way of tracking & invoicing renewals of memberships spread across the twelve months. I might use memorized transaction list for this. I had thought to run a separate company only to track the detail for Membership A/R. Could also do the same for Microloans. Deposits could be booked in total directly into the appropriate income account. Any thoughts about this?

Answer:

To setup QuickBooks for fund accounting and 990 reporting, you should setup your classes something like this:

Unrestricted

Admin

Fundraising

Programs

Membership

Microloans

Temporarily restricted:

Designated donations

Grants

Permanently restricted:

Endowments

Membership and Microloans are probably programs, though Membership could also be Fundraising.

One thing to keep in mind is QB 2011 Premier/Enterprise is the first time you can get any sort of decent balance sheet by class. It’s still not perfect but it’s closer than you’ll get with 2009.

Not sure why you’d need two A/R accounts, but it’s easy enough to setup. I really don’t recommend a separate file. If you’re going to enter the detail, you might as well enter it in your real file and having separate files opens up the opportunity of accidentally using the incorrect file.

Memorized invoices are definitely the way to go. Also, if you’re using QB merchant services, you can also setup recurring credit card charges.

{ 1 comment }

1 Indian Wampum August 10, 2011 at 6:14 am

Gosh, I wish I would have had that information earlier when our 501c3 was struggling with track accounting on QuickBooks.

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post: