Hi all. I run a small nonprofit, but we have gotten a couple of grants and I need to improve my invoicing workflow. I don’t need to track donors so much as I need to track progress on different grants. I know most people in my boat would just use QuickBooks. I really don’t want to do that. I’m using MoneyDance and it’s working fine. My needs are basic, but MoneyDance doesn’t handle invoicing. I’ve considered Freshbooks and Xero, but I’d really like to talk with someone who runs a non-profit to see what they’d recommend.
I don’t run a non-profit, so I don’t have that perspective, and I’ve never had a need to do invoicing.
GnuCash apparently has that function, though, so it might be worth a look. I’ve used GnuCash for years for keeping track of and reporting on spending accounts. It’s not fancy-looking software (pretty dated, really), but it gets the job done. And when I moved to it, I was very happy to get away from Quicken, which seemed to be trying to force an upgrade on me every year or so…
I like Xero but it’s similar functionality to QuickBooks which may be overkill for you. I believe it’s more expensive also. Have you looked at bill.com? It might be a good option.
I’m on the Board of Directors for a local nonprofit. I don’t know how big we are in comparison to you, but we run about a $400,000 per year budget. Not sure if this helps, but we use QuickBooks.
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Thanks @Ricky. I use Airtable already, but never thought of using it for invoicing. I installed their orders and invoicing template, but I don’t see a way to easily share a pdf invoice. Am I missing something?
We are much smaller. Needs are simple. I’ve used QuickBooks in the past and have no desire to use it again. I’m looking for QuickBooks alternatives.
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Zoho Books has competitive pricing and it offers free add-on modules for non-profits in the Zoho Marketplace like “Donor Management” and “Volunteer Portal”.
Zoho used to offer products with free tiers, but they removed most or all the free tiers. Still, they’ve got a deep product bench, and they have good support for Mac/iOS, even offering the free Google Keep competitor Notebooks.
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Gareth does a great job of explaining how to do it.
We do close to a thousand a month this way. In our case, we save to PDF in Dropbox, and because most of our customers still want a paper copy 
, We print them to send out by snail mail. If a customer will accept a digital copy, then it can easily be sent through Dropbox.
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