Donarius

Benefits:

This software is easy to use and has the best customer support I have ever experienced in any software I have ever used. I have used Donarius for over 20 years now.

Drawbacks:

There is nothing I do not like. Whatever my need, the software could handle or support helped me figure it out.

In sum:

12 out of 10. I have been delighted with this software and its upgrades to meet changing requirements. Great value for money as well.

Benefits:

- easy to add several categories for donations for one donor - if donations for a certain date are accidentally recorded on the wrong date (for instance, donations are recorded on a Monday instead of Sunday), the software allows for correcting the date on all donations recorded on that date - reports can be based on fiscal year or calendar year - the ability to specify how the donation was made (cash, cheque, credit card) and if cash, the breakdown of bills and coins. A report can be printed as a deposit slip - the ability to show donations for any period, including combined fiscal or calendar years - option to email receipts as PDF - ability to export reports to Excel to further customize reports or to add notes - ability to restore and entire backup or just additional data

Drawbacks:

- restoring a backup is easy, however, the backup needs to saved to a device and cannot be sent by email - you can report on donations using a line graph, but the predetermined increments are too large for our purposes (it would be nice to be able to customize this report)

In sum:

- the software is fairly user-friendly - this program allows for data entry of donations without impacting the actual accounting software (requires double entry, however, we record the donations as a summary; if we need the details we simply look it up in Donarius) - receipt printing at calendar year end is so quick and easy - the authorized signature can be imported and printed on each receipt

Benefits:

User friendly, ease of importing donations.

Drawbacks:

No visual images to go with the Help texts. Sometimes, pictures are worth a thousand words

In sum:

My church has been using Donarius for years. It is easy to use and when you need help, you are assured of excellent customer service!! I love the Import function - with just a click, you can move donation information into Donarius with no errors.

Benefits:

Setup of accounts and donors was straight-forward. Data entry is very easy. Reporting is quite robust. Statements and tax receipts are easy to generate and present very well.

Drawbacks:

The option to email statements seemed very difficult to use. I tried a few times and found it did not work well. After a couple of attempts I did not pursue any further.

In sum:

Overall this system has worked well for tracking donations to our church and worked well for generating statements and tax receipts. As well, reporting worked well and gave desired output with little setup.

Benefits:

2019 was the first year that our organization had to issue tax receipts for the generous donors of our organization. We purchased the basic module along with the module for emails, but we primarily used it for tax receipts only. It required very minimal training and fortunately the customer support provided by Donarius was always readily available. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] went out of the way to customize some of the reports required by us. At the most reasonable price, ease of use and customer support, our small charity could not ask for a better software than Donarius.

Drawbacks:

We would have liked a few additional detailed reports for capturing donor information sorted by donor, receipt number and by category, all in one report. We would have preferred a feature whereby the user could define the parameters and develop his/her own report.

In sum:

Our organization has no employees, but a group of 3-5 volunteers handling administrative, accounting and software apps. Our other colleagues delayed exploring Donarius features, so we had to get going in a short period of time to handle over 500 donors and more than 1500 donation amounts and trust the processing of all information. Donarius provided the comfort and confidence for us. Thanks to the dedicated support by [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] , always so helpful. Bravo!

Benefits:

Donairius is user-friendly and makes it easy to keep track of donations in a way that makes it easy to do end of year reports and tax receipts. I have been using it now for many years and find that it keeps improving and keeps current with the CRA requirements. The onus is on me to input the information correctly.

Drawbacks:

Past Doners gets deleted out of the system instead of staying hidden. If CRA should require any information it will not be in the system.

In sum:

I find that it is one stop software that I would recommend to any church who is looking for a program or application to keep track of their Donations.

Benefits:

It does a lot. Will increase your productivity. Great customer support. Very cheap.

Drawbacks:

No way to keep track of attendance. Not web-based (using it through dropbox will sometimes but rarely result in sychronisation issues when used by multiple users).

In sum:

This software does a lot of things and will eliminate many tasks that churches do twice (sometimes without even being aware). There's a little bit of a learning curve, but you will be impressed by everthing the software does for you. Be sure to use this to count your offering, and then it will do so much more. The customer support is great. I would recommend this software. The only downsides : no way to keep track of attendance. Also, this software would work better if it were web-based especially when used by multiple users in different locations. To deal with this problem, the software can be used through Dropbox (or other such applications), but we have found this type of solution will sometimes (but rarely) result in synchronisation issues (creating files in conflit).

Benefits:

I like the ease of doing all the aspects of the program. If I have encountered a problem, the company responds immediately to solve the issue. This is invaluable when you are needing to move ahead with what you are doing.

Drawbacks:

The thing I like least about this software is the inability to be able to enter separate donations for the same day. An example would be: on the same date, we enter donations that we received in the morning. We are not able to enter donations separately for the evening. We have to edit the previous morning's donations. This is not what we want to do.

In sum:

My overall experience with Donarius has been great.

Benefits:

Easy to use and excellent support

Drawbacks:

No problems to report

In sum:

The tellers use Donarius to enter all monies on the collection plants including Not Receipted items like rental income and loose offerings, Using a DropBox the envelope secretary and me (Treasurer) see the details and can easily correct any errors. This saves time and provides some protection for the envelope secretary as I keep a copy of what the tellers entered in case of a dispute with the donor. We have instant communication on Sunday. The tellers use a simple excel spread sheet for the bank deposit and that saves time. Prior to using Donarius the tellers used a hand written form and had trouble balancing as office skills like adding long columns of numbers even with a calculator are skills that are seldom used. The tellers now can handle about 60 envelopes in less than one hour about half the time they used to take. I run a year to date summary to balance by category with the financial statements I issue and report to CRA.

Benefits:

The software is fairly minimal, which makes it easy to find the things you need. I am able to add checks quickly because there are such few clicks. Very rarely do I need to use my mouse to click on anything unless I make a mistake. The pricing for the software is also unbeatable. I have looked at a variety of other software that have additional features, but the pricing structures are usually a subscription fee. Paying a low one-time fee makes this a valuable program for many non-profits!

Drawbacks:

Limited features do mean that you can't do all that you want. Ideally, I would love to be able to scan a large batch of checks and have them matched to the donor with the amount entered in as well. This would greatly speed up the process to a matter of minutes and would be an additional feature I would pay for. I have developed a workflow of using keyboard shortcuts to get to the appropriate donation box. I wish that I could designate which type of donation I am entering so I don't have to worry about putting it in the correct category. When we enter donations, they are all grouped together, but in Donarius, I still have to go to the field and enter the amount in.

In sum:

When I first began using Donarius, I was a bit disappointed with what it could do. I knew that there had to be some options to speed up our check depositing process. However, those options were much more expensive! By finding tips to make our workflow more efficient, we end up having very little downtime when making our check deposits.