Aplos is a cloud-based nonprofit and church accounting suite that helps you track donations, create giving statements, generate customized reports, and more automatically. Its features include online giving and tithing, bank reconciliation, a chart of accounts, and event registration. Prices start at $59 per month, and you can try it for free for 15 days with no credit card required.
What We Recommend Aplos For
We recommend Aplos for small to medium-sized faith-based and other nonprofit organizations that need an easy-to-use and affordable solution to manage donations, track donors, and raise money for their missions. It is easy to set up, making it an ideal choice for organizations with bookkeepers that have limited accounting experience.
Aplos Is Especially Good For
- Small to medium-sized churches: Aplos is ideal for churches with a few employees that don’t need complicated financial tracking. It was awarded our best overall choice in our review of the best church accounting software.
- Churches that need a website: A built-in website builder allows you to create your own site with no HTML or coding experience required.
- Churches accepting online donations: Create unlimited customized donation forms to accept online gifts from donors easily. You can even add a donation widget on your website so that donors can give without leaving your website.
- Nonprofits needing membership management tools: Aplos is great for nonprofits other than churches as well. We awarded it the best nonprofit accounting software for organizations that need membership management tools.
Aplos Is Not a Good Fit For
- Invoicing: Invoices are not attractive and cannot be customized. If your church does much invoicing, such as for child care services, you should consider a separate invoicing system like Invoicera.
- Mobile accounting: Aplos does not have a mobile accounting application like IconCMO.
- Organizations that need unlimited users: An Aplos account is limited to two administrator users. If you need unlimited user access, you should consider the desktop version of PowerChurch Plus.
Are you looking for something different? If you’re looking for basic bookkeeping features, and don’t need nonprofit management tools, check out our guide to the best small business accounting software.
Aplos Pros and Cons
| PROS | CONS |
|---|---|
| Wide range of church management and accounting features | Requires additional fee to add users |
| Create unlimited donation forms | Payroll needs a separate subscription |
| Build a website with no coding needed | Weak invoicing capability |
| Good reporting capability | Text message donations are not included in the base price |
Aplos Pricing
The standard Aplos suite costs $59 per month with key features like fund accounting, donation tracking, and event registration. If you wish to accept donations through text messaging, you need the Text To Give add-on. For advanced bookkeeping tasks, such as fixed asset tracking, you can subscribe to the Aplos Suite + Advanced Accounting package.
Pricing & Features | Aplos Suite | Aplos Suite + Text To Give | Aplos Suite + Advanced Accounting |
|---|---|---|---|
Cost/Month | $59 | $79 | $159 |
Fund Accounting | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Donation Tracking | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Text Messaging | N/A | ✔ | ✔ |
Recurring Transactions | N/A | N/A | ✔ |
Fixed Asset Tracking | N/A | N/A | ✔ |
Income & Expense Allocations | N/A | N/A | ✔ |
Aplos Features
From donation and tithe tracking to income and expense allocation, Aplos has plenty of features designed to help you simplify your fund accounting responsibilities. The Aplos Suite plan includes key features, such as fund accounting, a chart of accounts with unlimited funds, bank integration, journal entry, check printing, accounts payable (A/P) and accounts receivable (A/R), and bank reconciliation.
Reporting & Analytics
Aplos has a good reporting capability with more than 70 customizable financial and accounting reports available. You can create standard reports, such as income statements, balance sheets, budget reports, statements of activities, donor management, customer relationship management (CRM) reports, and more. You can save reports as PDF or export them to Excel as CSV files.
Payroll
Aplos integrates with Gusto to help you manage payroll duties. You can track your payroll manually in your payroll expense account or import your payroll information from Sage, Pathways, PayCycle, or ADP. With Aplos and Gusto, you can also file your local, federal, and state payroll taxes as well as 1099s and W-2s.
Online Giving and Tithing
Aplos lets you create customized mobile-friendly forms that you can share through email or social media for fundraising campaigns. The online giving platform includes a dedicated portal where donors can view and track their donations, download their giving statements, and update payment details. With Aplos, there is no need to enter contributions manually. The system automatically imports offline tithes and donations, so they can all be tracked in one place.
Giving Receipts and Statements
Your donor will receive an emailed receipt after a successful donation. Giving receipts can be customized to your brand, and you can send them quickly with a single click. You can track contributions by person and prepare monthly, quarterly, or yearly giving statements. You can also email giving statements to an individual or a list of contacts.
Recurring Giving
If you have generous donors with ongoing donations, you can have them set up a recurring donation in the donor portal. They can set up their profile, review processed donations, set a schedule for donations, print out statements, and update their payment information.
Chart of Accounts
The program includes a default chart of accounts that you can customize based on your preferences. You can add new accounts, subaccounts, or account groups. Aplos manages different types of transactions, such as online donations, journal entries, invoices and statements, cash receipts, and vendor payments. It also has a budgeting capability that enables you to track budget versus actual totals for the year.
Donation Tracking
With Aplos, you can track donations by donor. You can add either individual contributions or batch deposits. There are several ways to record a donation. One option is to import a batch of donations using an Excel template. Alternatively, you can record individual donations from the Contributions tab by clicking on the + button on the top right corner of your page. You will arrive at an online form where you will be required to provide details, such as contact name, the purpose of the donation, and the donation amount:
Adding a contribution in Aplos.
Event Registration
Aplos has a built-in event registration tool that allows you to create an online form for your event so that people can sign up. You can share your registration form through email, social media, or by adding a link to your website. The system tracks registrants automatically to help you plan your next steps seamlessly.
Website Builder
Create your own website even without coding experience. You can create your own templates and edit the homepage layout and header colors easily and add premade pages and stock images to customize the look and feel to reflect your organization. Many churches find their website helps people get more involved in their activities.
Text To Give
Your donors have the option to contribute to your organization through text messaging. They can send their offerings by texting to your toll-free number. As an administrator, you can receive unlimited gifts and set up shortcodes so that your donors can give to a specific cause. This feature is valuable for donors who don’t carry checks or cash and wish to donate anytime.
Customer Service and Ease of Use
I personally signed up for the free trial, and I needed to answer a few simple questions to get started. It’s easy to edit your chart of accounts, and you can import your contacts easily if you have an Excel file of your donors and vendors. It has a user-friendly interface that is easy to navigate, even for new users.
If you get stuck with something or have questions about a particular feature, you can contact Aplos customer support through chat, phone, or email. There are also training materials and tutorials to walk you through common functions.
When you sign up for the free trial, you will be greeted by a dashboard where you can find relevant oversight information about your organization, such as setup status, account balances, and recent activity. You can edit your dashboard based on your preferred metrics like total cash balance, income and expense, and expense breakdown.
Aplos’ default Dashboard.
Aplos Alternatives
Best for: Managing bulk invoices for services like daycare | Best for: Churches that need a mobile accounting app | Best for: Large churches with many employees |
Software from: $0 | Software from: $35 per month | Software from: $39.95 per month |
Bottom Line
Overall, Aplos is an extremely valuable program for faith-based organizations that want to manage donations, donor information, and accounting in a single platform. We consider it the best overall church accounting software because of its wide range of features, price, and powerful reporting capability. It is simple and user-friendly, making it useful for churches with inexperienced bookkeepers.
Sign up for a free 15-day trial with no credit card required to see how Aplos works for you.
