Custom Software for Nonprofits
Nonprofit software that does the grant math and shows its work
Small nonprofits run on restricted money, funder deadlines, and a few people doing several jobs each. We build the tools that keep grants, payroll, and board reporting straight — and we'll tell you when a spreadsheet is still enough.
Sound familiar?
- Grant reports get rebuilt from spreadsheets every month, by hand, from numbers you already entered somewhere else.
- Payroll is split across funding sources by hand, and the totals only tie after someone types in a correction.
- The board's financial packet is assembled manually the week of the meeting: copy, paste, reformat, and hope nothing changed since.
- Reimbursement requests and receipts arrive by email, and matching each one to the right grant line is somebody's evening.
- Audit prep is a panic — reconstructing who approved what, and when, from inboxes and file names.
What we build for nonprofits
In paperwork and anything touching money, AI reads and drafts, a person approves it, and the software does the math. Where the job is pure arithmetic, like payroll, there's no AI at all. Here's how that works in practice.
Grant tracking & audit-ready grant records
Umbrella HQ, built for Umbrella, a nonprofit bookkeeping firm. It extracts grant terms from award letters, pulls line items from receipts, budgets, and funder reports, and flags anomalies for the team to check. Status: Live.
Payroll allocation
For a grant-funded social-services nonprofit: each employee's wages, taxes, workers' comp, and health insurance split across about two dozen funding sources. It won't accept a payroll register until the totals tie out, and the journal entry has to balance to the penny with no hand-typed adjustments. No AI — the math has to be exact. Status: Live (beta).
Board financials
For a performing-arts nonprofit: the accountant uploads the month's financials, and the app turns them into dashboards and a board packet. The app is built to draft a 150–250-word monthly summary for the accountant to edit and approve, from that month's figures only, before the board sees it. Status: Live.
Expense approvals with receipt reading
Staff photograph a receipt or forward a reimbursement request. AI reads the vendor, date, and amounts into a draft line item; a person checks it, codes it to the right grant, and approves it; the software does the totals. This one we build to order — we don't have a nonprofit running it in production yet.
Frequently asked questions
What does custom software cost for a nonprofit?
Our standard rates are a $650 monthly platform fee plus $49 a month for each staff member who signs in. A five-person team is $650 + 5 × $49 = $895 a month; a two-person team is $748. The monthly fees cover hosting, monitoring, backups, security updates, bug fixes, and email support. Changes after launch are $150 an hour, done only after you approve them in writing, and larger builds are quoted separately. Rates are adjusted to each project and confirmed in a written quote before work starts. If that's more than the problem is costing you, a spreadsheet is the better answer, and we'll say so.
How do you protect donor, client, and payroll data?
Our contract commits us to encryption in transit (TLS), encryption at rest for designated sensitive fields, risk-based two-factor authentication, and role-based access controls. Your data is backed up automatically; your written quote states how often and how long backups are kept. If a breach ever compromised your data, the contract requires us to tell you without undue delay.
Does it work with QuickBooks?
Yes. We've built QuickBooks Online integrations before: Mr. Camera HQ, the system that runs my own production company, pushes approved estimates to QuickBooks and syncs payments back. On the nonprofit side, the payroll allocation tool produces a journal entry coded to the organization's QuickBooks accounts and classes, and the board financials app starts from the accountant's monthly QuickBooks close. Whether yours should be a live connection or a clean export depends on your setup, and the quote will say which.
Can our board see the numbers without another login?
Yes. In the board financials app we built for a performing-arts nonprofit, the board gets a PDF packet or a share link to a read-only view, and the link can be revoked. Board members who want to sign in can have read-only accounts; each person who signs in counts as a seat at the standard $49 a month unless your quote says otherwise.
Who owns our data?
You do. We claim no ownership of your data. We own and maintain the software and license it to you while you're a client, which is why hosting, fixes, security updates, and monitoring are included. Either side can end the agreement with 60 days' written notice. On the way out, your data is made available for export in a common format, such as CSV, and you have 30 days after the agreement ends to take it. Transition help is available at the hourly rate. No hostage data.
Tell us where the grant math breaks. We'll tell you what it costs to fix.
A short conversation about your funding sources, payroll, and reporting, then a written quote. If a spreadsheet is still the right tool, we'll say that instead.
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