At first glance, many people would think that working out the finances of a non profit organization is an easy task. Who wouldn’t? Without the need to worry about making profit, a non profit organization’s accounting system might easily be just a recording of the coming and goings of money from donor. Unfortunately, as it is usually with other things, that is not the case.

In a non profit organization, the accounting system takes a more twisted route. For one, private sector non profit organizations are ruled by the FASB while the government sector non profit organizations have GAAP set by GASB. Since most of the resources that non profit organizations have are controlled by donors, their accounting entities are grouped into three classes – unrestricted, temporarily restricted and permanently restricted.

Non profit organizations thrive with the help of various program and support activities. This includes research, public service, fund raising, donations and endowments. It is because of the complexity of the financial sources that non profit organizations usually need a more defined accounting software than those that cater to commercial accounting systems.

In the fundraising activity alone, non profit organizations would need to monitor a number of things – recording of funds, support for multiple entities, support for cross transactions, and report generation to name a few. Because of this, you would need to be wary when choosing which one to get for your organization. Some of the things that you would need to ask your nonprofit fund raising software provider are:

• How are gifts, grants, and pledges recorded?
• Can it export and import data from one format to another?
• How are constituents segmented?
• How does it track donors and prospective donors?
• Can you do searches using a number of criteria?
• How does the software record revenues and expenses from special events?

Aside from this, you would also need to ask your nonprofit fund raising software provider how long they have been in the business and how many clients with similar requirements have they serviced. It is also worthwhile to know how long the software roll out would take, what necessary trainings the user would need to undergo and if they provide 24/7 access to technical support.

If you want quality software without the need to check every provider, then you should go for the Sage Fundraising Software. As part of the Sage suite of applications, the Sage Fundraising Software provides scalability and customizability that other software applications do not have.