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QuickBooks for Nonprofits Tip: How to Track Donations

by Ruth Perryman 3. February 2010 11:39

Question: I found your email on one of the other live community questions. I hope it is ok that I emailed you. I am running into some frustrations with using the QuickBooks Nonprofit. When I first discussed the nonprofit with a QuickBooks rep I told them exactly what I wanted to see happen and what we needed and they assured me that the QuickBooks Nonprofit would be great for us. I beginning to wonder about that! This is what I would like to see happen.

I want to be able to use QuickBooks for my payroll (basic)

I want to be able to keep track of our expenses and income.

I want to be able to track our donors simply.

With these being done, I want to be able to go to QuickBooks at the end of each quarter and year and print a simple Profit & Loss report.

I would also like to be able to print out a Contribution Report to send to our donors at the end of the year as well.

Why does it seem more complicated than that. I can't even get the QuickBooks to take an amount of a donation. It kept making it a negative number and an error would come up. Please Ruth, can you help me get this under control. I must have set something up inccorrectly or I am totally missing the picture!

Answer:
QuickBooks for Nonprofits can handle everything you're asking for.

You probably don’t want to use Basic Payroll because it won’t generate your payroll tax forms. You need either Enhanced Payroll or Online Payroll. We offer online payroll for $25.99/mth for up to 10 employees. Additional employees are $1.25/mth. Let me know if you’d like more info.

For expenses, use Enter Bills/Pay Bills (in the Vendor menu) if you want to keep track of your payables, Write Checks or Enter Credit Card Charges (in the Banking menu) if you don’t. For revenue, use Enter Pledges/Receive Payments (in the Nonprofit menu) for pledges and Enter Donations (in the Nonprofit menu) for donations. In either case, you’ll need to use Make Deposits when you’re going to the bank to make the deposit and check off all the checks that are part of the deposit.

Donors are customers. You can create new customers in the Customer Center.

The Profit & Loss reports is in Reports > Company & Financial

There’s a Donor Contribution Summary report in Reports > Nonprofit Reports

If you are entering your donations correctly (see #2 above) and the amount is still negative, you’ve probably got your items setup incorrectly. Go to Lists > Items List, double-click on the item you use for your donations and check to make sure the account you’re using is one of your revenue accounts.

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Ruth Perryman - QuickBooks Specialist Written by Ruth Perryman, CMA, CFE, CFM, MBA, DPA (ABD)

Ruth is the president of The QB Specialists, an Intuit Solutions Provider that has helped thousands of businesses throughout the United States, Canada and even the Caribbean get the most out of QuickBooks since 1996. Ruth has over 20 years of industry experience, including 5 years as a Chief Financial Officer. She is an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and a member of Intuit’s Trainer/Writer Network. She is also certified in QuickBooks Point of Sale and Enterprise.

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