Tag: QuickBooks

Tool to Calculate the Aplos Journal Entries to Replicate the QuickBooks Credit Card Fees

The next step in the process is to add the credit card fees that need to be charged to each donation. These charges are accessible in the QuickBooks Journal Report.

The QuickBooks Journal Report is an MS Excel spreadsheet that is nice for human consumption. But, there does not seem to be any QuickBooks provision for getting a nice clean machine-readable format so we work with what we have.

So, the real work of this “module” is building a QuickBooks Journal Report decoder. The rest of this application has already been built and is simply being reused. In fact, the human interface is starting to become a bit standard…

The workflow is pretty much the same as well…

  1. Download the QuickBooks Journal Report  Report from QuickBooks Online (a horrible experience for all concerned!)
  2. Upload this report into the “R” Language Shiny webpage.
  3. Check the QuickBooks Journal Report for errors and process it to build the Aplos Journal file.
  4. Download the Aplos Journal file.
  5. Upload the Aplos Journal file into Aplos.

Here is the link to the “R” Language Shiny Webpage that runs the application. Feel free to give it a try – of course you will need data so send me a note if you are interested.

LGL Giving Report to Aplos Import Contributions Conversion Tool

Continuing to build up the accounting data set it is now time to start to move donation data to Aplos in real-time.

As a bit of an aside, we contract with a company to handle our front-end donation processing. They work with another company that has a very old-fashioned donation management system called LGL. While it may be old-fashioned it works and we don’t think we can change accounting and donation management at the same time. This isn’t going to be easy but we’re going to have to run with the existing donation management system and use automation to enter donation data into the Aplos system.

In the future I envision this to be the bread-and-butter application for our front-end contractor. This application starts the process of learning how to do this task well.

  1. Download the “LGL Giving”  Report from LGL.
  2. Upload this report into the “R” Language Shiny webpage.
  3. Process the report to build the Aplos Manual Contributions Input file.
  4. Download the Aplos Manual Contributions Input file.
  5. Upload the Contributions Input file into Aplos.

Here is the link to the “R” Language Shiny Webpage that runs the application. Feel free to give it a try – of course you will need data so send me a note if you are interested.

Tool to Calculate the Journal Entries Needed to Replicate the QuickBooks Checkbook Entries in the Aplos System.

The next big task is getting all the QuickBooks Checkbook entries entered into the Aplos system.

This is very similar to calculating the Cord Ministries Fees from the Aplos “Detailed Donations by Contact” Report except that this time the data source is the QuickBooks Checkbook output file.

  1. Download the “Checkbook” Report from QuickBooks.
  2. Upload this report into the “R” Language Shiny webpage.
  3. Process the report to build the Aplos journal entries.
  4. Download the Aplos journal entries file.
  5. Upload the journal entries into Aplos.

Here is the link to the “R” Language Shiny Webpage that runs the application. Feel free to give it a try – of course you will need data so send me a note if you are interested.

Calculate Cord Ministries Fees from the Aplos “Detailed Donations by Contact” Report

I’m excited!

This is my first “R” Language task for the new Aplos Fund Accounting system.

The task is relatively simple:

  1. Download the “Detailed Donations by Contact” Report from Aplos.
  2. Upload this report into the “R” Language Shiny webpage.
  3. Process the report to build the Aplos journal entries to Transfer Donations to Funds and/or to Transfer Fees to General Fund.
  4. Download the Aplos journal entries file.
  5. Upload the journal entries into Aplos.

Here is the link to the “R” Language Shiny Webpage that runs the application. Feel free to give it a try – you will need data so contact me if you are really serious.

Aplos: The New Cord Ministries Fund Accounting System

Cord Ministries has outgrown the QuickBooks Online system. There are four primary reasons we’ve come to this conclusion:

  1. We are being pressed to move to a true “Fund Accounting” system, which no matter what QuickBooks says, they are not.
  2. We need to have multiple people working on the accounts at the same time and this is expensive with QuickBooks.
  3. The QuickBooks Online system is old technology that is limiting our work.
  4. There is no integrated donor management system with QuickBooks.

These are pretty severe and non-negotiable reasons but we have a huge time, energy, training, and data investment in QuickBooks so we are hesitant to move to another system.

Aplos says they have everything we need and the look-and-feel of the demo and trial accounts is really nice. Continue reading “Aplos: The New Cord Ministries Fund Accounting System”