Nonprofit mode

SlowBooks is free and source-available, and always will be. Small nonprofits — churches, clubs, PTOs, community arts groups, small foundations — are the people it can help most, and they pay for a "nonprofit edition" of everything else. Nonprofit mode is one switch in Settings. Nothing in your data changes name; the screens, the printed documents and the reports do.

Turning it on

Settings → Company Information → Company Type → Nonprofit. The page reloads in nonprofit words and the four accounts the mode needs are created if they are missing (3300 Net Assets Without Donor Restrictions, 3400 Net Assets With Donor Restrictions, 4400 In-Kind Contributions, 6960 Bad Debt Expense — the numbers yield to an existing chart). Switch back any time; nothing is lost either way. The statements never add these accounts on a read (2.31.2): a company switched to nonprofit over the API with PUT /api/settings alone, or an older file that never ran setup, shows a net-asset line by name with no account until a release, in-kind gift or write-off posts; run Settings → Company Type again, or POST /api/nonprofit/setup-accounts, if a statement shows one.

What changes on screen

The QuickBooks import screens, the tax screens and the employee pages keep their own vocabulary on purpose. The API and the database never change name: /api/customers is still /api/customers.

Printed documents are literal, not vocabulary. A donation prints as DONATION RECEIPT, a pledge as PLEDGE, and a program fee or a hall rental — which a nonprofit still issues — prints as INVOICE. The pledge flag on the invoice form decides which.

Funds

A class is a fund. Settings → Funds → Edit sets:

• Restriction — without donor restrictions, with donor restrictions (purpose or time), or with donor restrictions (permanent). The last two report together as "with donor restrictions" (ASU 2016-14); the three-way label is there because treasurers still think in it.
• Default function — program services, management & general, or fundraising. Every expense posted to the fund takes this function unless the line says otherwise.
• Donor / grantor and Purpose — printed on the fund balance report.

The untagged bucket ("Uncategorized") is always without restrictions.

Grants

A grant is a job: it belongs to the funder (a donor), carries a budget by cost code, a period and an award amount, and rolls costs up the same way a contractor's job does. Tag the award and the program's bills to both the restricted fund and the grant, and the job page shows budget, committed, actual and variance for the grant while the fund reports show restriction.

Recording gifts

• A gift with no pledge — enter a Donation (a sales receipt). It is revenue at once. If the donor got something back (the gala dinner), enter the fair value and a description; the receipt states the deductible portion.
• A pledge — a Recurring Pledge for monthly or annual giving (each installment is generated as a pledge), or a one-off pledge on the Create Pledges page. Payments against pledges are the gifts; the pledge report shows what was promised, invoiced, received, written off and still outstanding.
• A pledge that will never be paid — Write Off on the pledge row. It posts a credit memo to Bad Debt Expense and applies it at once. Void the credit memo to undo.
• A recurring pledge that should stop — set its End Date. That is what ends a pledge and what the pledge report counts; clearing Active only pauses it (the report still shows the full promise). A recurring pledge that has already generated installments can't be deleted (its pledges would be left orphaned) — set the End Date instead. Re-ticking Active after a pause resumes from today and skips the paused months rather than back-dating a pledge for each one; a schedule past its End Date must have the date moved or cleared first (409 otherwise, 2.31.1).
• Property — an In-Kind Gift: each line names what the property is (an asset or expense account) and the donor's estimate of its value. The credit is In-Kind Contributions. The acknowledgment describes the property and never states a value — the donor values the gift, not the charity (IRS Publication 1771).

One deposit, several donors

When the bank shows one deposit of $1,500 that is really two $750 gifts, book it as one entry with a line per donor, so the bank balance matches the statement and each donor is still credited with their own gift:

1. From the register — + Entry, enter the deposit's total as the amount, then Split this entry…. Give each line its income account, its share, and the Donor. The Fund column appears on each line when you use funds; a line left on "Same as header" takes the entry's fund. + New Donor in the Donor list adds a donor without leaving the entry.
2. Against the bank feed — book the split deposit in the register as above and Match the feed's deposit row to it, as for any entry already in your books. The bank feed's add call (POST /api/banking/transactions/{id}/add) also takes the same splits, each with its own customer_id and class_id, for an import that books rows itself.
3. A plain deposit with one donor — the Donor box on the entry names that one gift, no split needed.

The lines must add up to the deposit. Each donor's year-end giving statement lists their line as a gift on the deposit's date, and the donor counts are the same everywhere the gifts are read. Voiding the deposit takes every donor's line out. The register shows the donor's name for a one-donor deposit and "Split (2 names)" for several, unless you typed a payee.

To add a donor to an entry you already booked, open it in the register and choose the donor on its line, then Save. This works on a reconciled deposit too: the donor is a label, so the amounts, the date and the reconciliation do not change.

Each donor line gets the same thank-you letter a donation does: open the deposit in the register to edit it and use Acknowledgment (PDF) or Email beside the donor's name.

Check images on a deposit are not stored yet.

A payment recorded with nothing to apply to is a donor credit on the receivable until it meets a pledge; enter a gift with no pledge as a Donation so it is revenue the day it arrives.

Acknowledgments

Every gift gets a written acknowledgment: Acknowledgment (PDF) and Email Acknowledgment on the donation, payment and in-kind views. The wording is yours — Settings → Email Templates → donation_acknowledgment (press Seed Default Templates first if the list is empty; until then the built-in wording is used) — with {{ irs.text }} supplying the sentence the IRS requires (no goods or services were provided; or the fair value of what was, and the deductible portion). A receipt's own payment is not a second gift; the receipt is what gets acknowledged.

Month end

1. Allocate shared costs. Rent, utilities, the office manager's wages: post them Unassigned (allocate later) (the function picker's last choice, or omit the function on a line in a fund with no default). A saved allocation rule (Functional Allocations page) says how they divide — by percent, by square feet, or by hours worked on grants — across functions and/or funds. Run the rule for the month: it moves everything still unassigned on the rule's source account into the columns as a same-account reclass, so the Statement of Activities does not change by a cent and the Statement of Functional Expenses has its columns. Running the same month twice finds nothing to move; void a run to put the cost back. The same rules drive the Split button on a bill or journal line when you would rather allocate at entry.
2. Release from restriction. When a restricted fund spends for its purpose, release that much to net assets without donor restrictions: Releases from Restriction → Release → pick the fund. The amount suggested is the fund's spending in the period less what was already released.

Year end

• Giving statements — Report Center → Year-End Giving Statements: Download all (PDF), every donor in one PDF with a page break each (print the stack), or Email all (donors who opted out on their record are skipped); one donor's own statement is Giving Statement (last year) on the donor's record (GET /api/donors/{id}/giving-statement/pdf?year=). Cash gifts with the amount eligible for a deduction and a running total (whether a donor can deduct it depends on their own return: from tax year 2026 non-itemizers may deduct some cash gifts and itemizers face a floor); non-cash gifts described without amounts; the IRS sentence at the foot.
• The ministry's own words — Settings → Giving Statement (nonprofit mode) keeps the ministry's own message and footer on the statement. The Opening messages are saved the same way as Invoice Messages (a short list, one the default); the default one prints above the gift table (a thank-you from the pastor or the board). The Footer text replaces the fixed footer (the ministry's address, website, EIN, a verse) and prints in each page's bottom margin, so a long footer on a multi-page statement never overprints the gift table. Both are plain text with line breaks, printed as typed and escaped as text (no HTML); a message is at most 1500 characters and the footer 500. They ride on all three outputs the same — the single PDF, the all-donors stack and the emailed copy. Leave the message or footer unset to print what printed before; either way a donor's statement carries no product name. The IRS acknowledgment sentence is always printed and is not editable. Preview one donor's statement renders the first donor's (a sample donor on a file with no gifts yet) with the saved words — save first, then preview. The giving-statement messages and the footer are an administrator's to change, audited like the settings around them.
• No closing entry is needed. Income and expense are never closed to equity in this ledger; the Statement of Financial Position splits the change in net assets by restriction at report time, the way the balance sheet already synthesizes net income. The two net-asset lines always add up to the balance sheet's total equity.

The statements

All five are computed from the same posted lines as the P&L and balance sheet and reconcile to the cent; each has PDF and CSV. The Statement of Activities, Financial Position and Functional Expenses take a Basis (accrual or cash) like the P&L (2.30.0), so a church on the cash basis reports on it.

The functional-expense CSV is in Part IX column order (A total, B program, C management, D fundraising) for the preparer; the row mapping to Part IX line numbers is not done for you.

Year over year. The Statement of Activities and the Statement of Functional Expenses have a "Compare to prior year" box: the same dates one year earlier appear as two more columns (prior year, change) on screen, in the PDF and in the CSV (?compare=prior_year on the API).

Where a PDF goes. In the desktop app, Save PDF writes the file to Documents → SlowBooks Pro → Reports, opens it in a viewer window, and shows a "Saved to …" notice with a Show in folder button. Filenames carry the period, so two runs never overwrite each other. Saved report definitions (the "Add to Saved Reports…" button) are a different thing: they are listed under Saved Reports at the top of the Report Center, as a collapsible list.

Driving nonprofit mode from the API

Everything above is an API call, so a bring-your-own-AI agent with a scoped token can do the month-end and year-end work unattended, in this order:

1. GET /openapi.json — every nonprofit path is described.
2. PUT /api/settings {"company_type": "nonprofit"} then POST /api/nonprofit/setup-accounts (a signed-in administrator; a bookkeeper token gets 403 on settings).
3. POST /api/classes with restriction and default_function; POST /api/customers with donor_type, salutation, send_year_end_statement; POST /api/jobs for a grant.
4. Gifts: POST /api/sales-receipts (with fair_value_amount / fair_value_description when goods were provided), POST /api/recurring
   • POST /api/recurring/generate?as_of= for pledges, POST /api/payments against them, POST /api/in-kind-gifts for property.
5. Shared costs: post the line with "function": null (omit the key to take the fund's default). POST /api/nonprofit/allocation-rules, then GET …/{id}/split?amount= at entry or GET …/{id}/preview and POST /api/nonprofit/allocations at month end.
6. GET /api/nonprofit/releases/suggest?class_id=&start_date=&end_date= then POST /api/nonprofit/releases (omit amount to take the suggestion).
7. POST /api/invoices/{id}/write-off; POST /api/credit-memos/{id}/void to undo.
8. Statements: GET /api/reports/statement-of-activities, /statement-of-financial-position, /fund-balances, /functional-expenses, /pledges, each with /pdf and /csv.
9. Acknowledgments: GET /api/donors/gifts/{invoice|payment|in-kind}/{id}/acknowledgment/pdf and POST …/acknowledgment/email; year end: GET /api/donors/giving-statements/pdf?year= and POST /api/donors/giving-statements/batch-email.

What is deliberately out

Form 990 filing itself; a donor CRM (campaigns, appeals, events — a donation's fund is the campaign); endowment spending-policy accounting (permanently restricted is a label here); grant compliance rules beyond the budgets jobs carry; a year-end closing entry.