How to Automate Aplos

Restricted money has to prove where it went

Aplos is fund accounting software for nonprofits and churches. Where an ordinary ledger answers how much came in and how much went out, a fund ledger answers a harder question: how much of the building fund is left, and was every dollar of the youth grant spent on the youth.

That distinction is not a preference. A donor who gives to the missions fund has placed a restriction on the gift, and the organisation is accountable for honouring it. A grantor funding a specific program expects the same, in writing, on a schedule they set rather than one you choose.

So Aplos holds both sides of the organisation at once. The chart of accounts and the funds, the donor records and their giving history, the online giving forms, the events people registered for, and the reports that turn all of it into a balance sheet a board can actually read.

The people in it are a bookkeeper, a treasurer who is often a volunteer, an executive director who wants one number, and an auditor once a year who wants all of them.

The gifts arrive from everywhere except the ledger

Money reaches a small nonprofit through more doors than anyone designed.

A card processor payout for the ticketed fundraiser. A balance sitting in a giving page on the old website nobody retired. A donor-advised fund that mails a cheque with a letter naming a program. A peer-to-peer fundraiser that pays out weeks later in one lump nobody can split back to donors. A grantor portal that posts the disbursement, the conditions and the reporting deadline, and emails nobody about any of it.

Every one of those has to be found, split to the right fund, matched to the right donor and reconciled to a bank line.

Then the reporting runs the other way. The grantor wants a spend-down figure against their budget categories by a date printed only inside their portal. The state wants the annual charity registration renewed. The board wants to know why the restricted balance moved.

It is a week of signing into other people's systems and typing what you find into your own.

Aplos

Payouts matched to the gifts behind them Each processor and giving page read overnight, so the gap between what donors gave and what the bank received arrives as a short list.

Grant conditions watched in the funder's portal Disbursements, reporting dates and covenant text pulled from the grantor's own site and set against the fund as your books have it.

Charity registrations that flag themselves State filing and solicitation renewal statuses checked on the sites that hold them, so a lapse is a diary note rather than a suspension.

Aplos closes the books it was given

Aplos handles the inside of this well, and it is worth being clear about how much comes with it.

Income and expense are tracked by fund, so a balance sheet or income statement can be pulled and filtered by fund, tag or month without rebuilding anything, and donor-restricted gifts stay tied to their purpose. The donor database keeps giving history, communication activity, notes and relationships on one record. Online donation forms and website widgets take gifts without sending anyone off your site, and every online gift is tracked by donor and purpose as it arrives. Advanced Accounting tracks grant balances, expenses and budgets for organisations running several programs at once.

All of that is true of money that arrived through a channel Aplos was built to receive.

The wall is everything else. A grantor's portal. A payment processor's dashboard. A state charity registration site. A donor-advised fund sponsor's account page. Each holds a figure or a date the ledger depends on and has no way of seeing.

Every restricted fund can watch its own conditions

Once the books can read the outside world, the month stops opening with a round of logins.

Yesterday's payouts collected from each processor and giving page and laid against the deposits, so the difference between what donors gave and what the bank received is a short list rather than an afternoon. The peer-to-peer lump broken back out against the donor report it came from, ready to be allocated.

Grantor portals read on a schedule: the disbursement posted, the reporting deadline, the conditions text, and the balance the funder believes remains, all set beside the fund as your ledger has it. A covenant that changed quietly in the portal surfaces with a quarter left to respond in.

Charity registration renewals and filing statuses watched on the state sites that hold them, so a lapse is a note in spring rather than a suspended solicitation permit in autumn.

Pledges checked against what actually cleared, with the ones that never arrived named and a reminder drafted for the development lead rather than sent.

Evidence can be gathered without anyone touching the ledger

Every one of those answers is on a screen somebody has to log into, read, and then retype into Aplos. The reading and the retyping are the part that does not need a bookkeeper.

WebRun is an agent that drives a real Chrome browser, signed in the way your staff sign in. It opens the grantor's portal, the processor dashboard or the state registration site, reads what is there, and reports it against the funds and donors your books already carry.

Nothing posts. No journal is written, no disbursement is released, no filing is made and no donor is contacted without a person approving it first. It runs on your schedule, sessions are not shared between workflows, a workflow can be locked to named domains, and any run can be watched and stopped.

The workflows below each name what they open.