INTRODUCTION > Introduction

This manual covers release number 4.06 of the ACCOUNTS program for Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 11, or Windows Server 2008 SP2 or later. ACCOUNTS is a product of Software4Nonprofits.

To see the changes between successive versions of ACCOUNTS, see the Revision History.

The program is used for basic bookkeeping and accounting, primarily for charitable organizations (including churches) in Canada, the U.S.A., and elsewhere. It features fully automatic fund accounting for those organizations that need it.

If you also need to track your donors and donations and issue charitable receipts, we would invite you to consider our companion DONATION software program. Of course, ACCOUNTS can also be used without DONATION, if you do not need that sort of donor and donation tracking and receipting, or if you have another solution for that aspect of your operations that you are happy with. DONATION and ACCOUNTS can interact through the Bank Deposits feature in DONATION (though not in its free Lite version). That feature allows you to specify which donations are part of a bank deposit, then export that as a summary transaction (summarized by donation category / income account) and import it into ACCOUNTS.

There are several versions of ACCOUNTS - the regular full (Standard), Local Network,and OnDemand versions.

The following are some of the general features of all versions of ACCOUNTS.

Chart of Accounts

•Three levels of accounts, sub-accounts and sub-sub-accounts are available.

•Equity accounts are called Funds in the program, and represent the distinct funds for which you want to track income and expenses, plus a fund balance.

•Each Income or Expense account is linked to one fund. Transactions on such accounts implicitly change the balance in the fund - no assignment of classes or projects is required, and no journal entries are needed to keep fund balances correct.

•Each account can be linked with one or more lines on government forms, such as the T3010 in Canada or the 990 or 990-EZ in the U.S.A., so that you can print reports showing what amounts go on what lines of those forms.

•Annual budgets can be defined for accounts, and reported on.

•Your chart of accounts can be imported from other mass-market programs (QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, Quicken, or Simply Accounting / Sage 50 Canadian Edition).

•Alternatively, you can start with an empty chart of accounts and define it entirely yourself, or you can start with one of several sample charts of accounts (that are pre-linked to the lines on the form T3010, 990 or 990-EZ).

Data Entry

•You can enter transactions via chequebook register-style windows, the special purpose Write Cheques, Enter Deposits and Credit Card Charges windows, or a journal entry window.

•You can set up vendors, enter bills for later payment, and pay those bills through separate special purpose windows. (This is an "Accounts Payable" module.)

•Sales tax codes can be defined, linked to sales tax accounts. Selecting a sales tax code as part of a transaction entry does an automatic split of the transaction amount, to give the correct amounts to those linked sales tax accounts.

•You can import transactions from files downloaded from your online banking, for bank and credit card accounts.

•You can import bank deposits exported from Software4Nonprofits DONATION (which is for tracking donors and donations and issuing receipts).

Reports

•ACCOUNTS has over 30 built-in reports, and a Custom Reports feature.

•It allows you to export reports to various file formats, such as PDF, Excel and CSV (comma separated value).

•You can customize reports with revised sorting and filtering.

•Customized reports can be memorized for later re-use.

•You can print cheques on standard 3-part voucher check stock.

Other Features

•ACCOUNTS has context-sensitive help and a full manual online.

•It uses a powerful open source SQL-based Firebird database, and thus the data can be accessed for other purposes (with appropriate tools).

•It can be used to store the accounting for multiple organizations on the same computer.

•It has simple options to backup all of your data to a local drive (preferably a USB memory key), and to restore such backups. Those backups can also optionally be followed by an encrypted backup to a secure Internet location, and those Internet backups can be restored.

•It lets you send encrypted database backups to yourself or a colleague by email, and restore those backups.

•It reminds you to do backups of your database weekly, or at a frequency of your choice.

•While the program is entirely in English, limited entry of accents and characters for foreign languages should be possible.

•Dates and currency are displayed in your regional format, as defined in Windows Control Panel's Regional settings.

Limitations / Requirements

•It is probably best suited to small to mid-sized organizations, because many larger organizations might want a more full-featured and customizable program.

•It runs under all recent versions of Windows: Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 11, or Windows Server 2008 SP2 or later.

•It is possible to use it successfully on a Mac using programs such as Parallels (which allows you to install a copy of Windows and then run Windows programs on a Mac). However, we cannot support any problems that are specific to using it on a Mac.

•It requires your screen properties to be set to 1024 x 600 or higher, with Normal size Fonts selected in your Display settings, or to 1024 x 768 or higher, if you are using Large size Fonts. This program will not work on an 800 x 600 display, because there would be insufficient room for some of the program's windows.