 Welcome. I believe some of you are probably new to our net squared events. And just to give you a little bit background of net squared, it's a great organization to help nonprofits kind of bridge the gap between themselves and technology. So we do a lot of these webinars and the organizer here for Toronto. Although I think we could potentially have people from all over the world joining us. And if you're from somewhere interesting, let us know. Say hello in the chat. Feel free to use the chat throughout this session to ask questions or have any comments and I'll be sure to keep an eye on that for Dan as he's presenting. So a little bit more about me. I became involved with next square because I was, I'm running a charity as well. I'm the president for the one parent family association. And we basically help single parents and their kids kind of, you know, support each other. We haven't been able to do much with this pandemic, but hoping to kind of get back into maybe some online events and really looking forward to where we can actually get together in person again as well. So in running all that stuff I came across net squared and found that they were looking for an organizer for Toronto. So I figured it was a perfect fit for me because of my technology background. I run all of that systems and I basically help small businesses and charities bring together people processes and technology to help build more efficient systems. I do like I enjoy helping businesses implement G Suite. It seems to be a good one that most people tend to start with, but there's a whole bunch of stuff I do. I'm not going to take up too much more time if you want to learn more about me. Please feel free to reach out, book a call with me. I love to meet new people and hear what you guys are doing and if I'm able to help I would love to. I'm going to pass this on to Dan, who is our highlight for this lunch and learn today, who's going to be walking us through some exciting software that will hopefully be of use to you guys. So Dan, I will pass it along to you. Thank you very much, Sandra. Okay, so just to let you know what my plan is. I'm going to talk to you for five or 10 minutes, sort of about where my business came from, how it developed, and then show you a couple of very short videos, kind of the teaser videos from our website. And then go through the software a bit more and then take some questions and we'll see how that goes. So, sorry. I'm a Quaker, which is a progressive originally Christian church long story. And I was involved in the finances of the Quaker meeting here in Toronto. I was a computer programmer by my trade. And we bought a little program to track donors and donations and issued charitable receipts it was called church mouse. And then it started falling apart in some very dumb ways. And I said to myself, I can write something better than that. And that was way back in 1994 in the DOS days. So we had the I had the DOS program that only my Quaker meeting was using from about 94 to 99, at which point Windows was coming along. And I become proficient in a Windows development environment called power builder in a job I was in. And so I redeveloped it in power builder and then I started giving it away for free on the website on a website back then it was free donation software dot org. And by 2007 we had about 4500 users, I had it was all me. And I was accepting some donations but it wasn't I wasn't trying to make a business of it. And then for slightly long story complicated reasons part of which involved worries about what happens if I get run over by a boss, you know, to all those users. I decided to make a business out of it so basically at that point. I told all my users, look, of course, you've got the program you got it was when it was free you can keep it, but from now on support and upgrades will cost me started a very low affordable prices. And under $100 per year. And it just kind of kept growing from that I hired my first employee in 2014. Second one in 2017 and that's it that's still our entire business, the three of us and one little contractor. And so currently we have about over 8000 registered users of the original program which of course has evolved greatly, which is called donation for tracking donors and donations and issuing charitable receipts and something over 1300 users of a bookkeeping program accounts that I wrote in 2012, which is also completely automates fund accounting for those of you who are involved in accounting you know that you probably know that that's an issue with with traditional programs like QuickBooks. You can use classes and stuff to categorize stuff but it's not the same as true fund accounting and you end up meeting weird workarounds and journal entries and stuff to keep fun balances up to date. So from here I'm just going to show you a couple of very short there one to two minutes each little intros to each program that we have on our website so I'm going to just start by sharing sharing the website here we go. Actually you know what I'm going to share the whole screen and it'll make it easier to switch between some things. Okay, so here's here's our homepage. You can see our tagline here is simple powerful affordable. The first tagline was actually this is kind of interesting simple powerful all you need. And of course, it was all some people would need but I ended up feeling that was not truthful and actually that's a really important time sorry principle for me being truthful and transparent. So we changed it to this simple powerful affordable and of course all of those things are judgment calls but nevertheless. So I'm just going to show you this, as it says one minute overview of the donation program the first one. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, that didn't. Sorry. You didn't get the audio from that did you. I don't think so. Okay, I messed up when I started the share without telling it to do the audio. Yeah, we'll start that again. Sorry, I should have learned this lesson by now I've done done these things so many times. I do it all the time to no worries. Just Sandra just yell at me if you can't hear it this time okay. Welcome to donation a simple powerful and affordable program. It is used to record your donors and donations and issue the charitable receipts also called contribution statements on this main window you can enter your donors and your donations. You can also find all of the features through the menu here. For churches or other faith groups, you can use this batch entry window to quickly enter the donations from one collection. When you are ready, you can easily create the receipts for one or all donors. Here's a sample for Canada. And here's a sample for the USA. There are lots of built in reports, as you can see on this report browser and also custom reports. You can even have multiple databases for multiple organizations or share your database safely over the Internet at no additional cost. Other features include mail merge letter capabilities. Here's one merged example. The comprehensive help system covers all of the features in full detail. Please try our free 60 day evaluation, which will be your first step to joining thousands of happy users. Okay, so that's that's the intro to donation. And just just so you know what we're talking about about affordable. This is the sort of pricing we're talking like the most core version is $100 for the first year. That's not per month that's pretty for the year, and then $50 for support and upgrades in subsequent years and then there's, there's some multi user versions that are close to twice that that price so that's the sort of price you know we're definitely aiming at the load range churches and charities for this. Now let me just switch over to the accounts program and just show you its quick intro video as well. Welcome to accounts, a simple, powerful and affordable bookkeeping program that includes automated fund accounting from this main window. You can see your account balances and access the features through the quick links at the left plus all of the features are on the menu. Most data entry can be done on this register window, but there are also special purpose entry windows like this one for right checks. If you wish, you can also record bills in advance here and record their payments later here. Funds in the program are running balances constantly and automatically updated by income and expenses on linked accounts. This window shows the association of accounts to funds. And this is one page of a sample fund income statement showing both the income and expenses for each fund and the change in its balance due to that. You can't get that from conventional bookkeeping program. There are lots of built in reports as you can see on this report browser and also a custom reports option. You can define annual or monthly budgets, reconcile your bank statements and import downloaded transactions from online banking. You can also associate accounts with lines on government forms like the T-3010 for Canada and the 990 for the USA, which allows you to get out a report such as this one to help with filling in those forms. You can even have multiple databases for multiple organizations or share your database safely over the internet at no additional cost. A comprehensive help system covers all of the features in full detail. Please try our free 60-day evaluation, which will be your first step to joining well over a thousand happy users. Okay, so that is, you know, the quick overview. Now, let me just go into each program and show you a bit more. And there was one question from somebody wondering if you can be integrated with WordPress? Well, no, because it's installed Windows software. So I don't really see how or why you would do that. Let me just stop the sharing a moment and maybe that person can sort of explain what they're thinking a bit more. Feel free to come on mute if you want to explain a little more what kind of future you're looking for. Okay, well, anyways, just just to speak to that a bit. I mean, like I said, this is aimed at small to mid-sized churches, charities and nonprofits. Basically, we're just trying to do sort of the core jobs with the donation program. The core jobs are track donors, track donations, issue tax receipts. Okay, and then in addition to that, you have, you know, a bunch of reporting and mail merge documents. And you can also email receipts and you can do emails to users, but it's not, you wouldn't use it to replace a mass mailing system unless you had a very small number of donors. And with the accounts program, it's your core bookkeeping with accounts receivable, accounts payable but not accounts receivable because most nonprofits don't really have much in the way of accounts receivable. We're not doing payroll. That's too complicated for a small business like ours or you can integrate that with third party payroll systems. You know, WordPress, that's a whole other thing. That's your social media, whatever it is, it's not, I wouldn't see that as being connected to those core functions of the software that we're doing. We're not trying to do everything that any nonprofits do by any means. Okay, so let me just, let me just go back and I was going to just show the programs in a bit more detail. Sharing the screen again. Okay, so you're going to get to the donation piece here is there a way to import. Absolutely. Absolutely. Under a database import, there's features for importing donors donations for donors and donations together which which would be the case with certain certain things you would download from like Canada Alps, PayPal, a couple of things like that. Vanco, if you use Vanco for online donations and we're, we're actually working on an online donation system that'll be quite tightly integrated with the program. It's called Abundant. It's from ACS Technologies in the States. And then we've also got imports from certain other programs that, that, you know, people have used over the years membership plus VNsoft which disappeared, Gemino which disappeared and gift works which got taken over a few years ago and had their price greatly increased and a lot of people weren't happy about that. Yeah, and, you know, the, the sort of general import features here, import from Excel or CSV or tabs, separate attacks, and they're very flexible as you can see basically this is the, the import for donors and donations together and basically you just got this long list of fields that can be imported, and you move them over to the fields to import here, including you know things like skip four columns because there's four columns in the input that are irrelevant, and you just arrange them in the order that they match your input file. And then you can also look. I'm sorry, load and save those settings. So like if you've got it, it actually automatically saves your last set of settings and brings it back if you come back to this window. Maybe you're in a situation where you're importing from multiple files from different vendors, then you would want these name settings. So that that answers that question. So the, the mail merge stuff is done through it's basically uses a HTML files. So for instance if I edit this standard donor letter which is, as you can see it's just a sample right. There are various mail merge fields and you know anybody that's use mail merge can see how this works, and I can insert a signature here. Sure. And, you know, obviously edit this however you want. And this is a very simple editor. So it's not, you know, if you've got some super fancy layout of your, your, your mail merge letters, you may not be able to do it but for basic, basic text with some tables or whatever. Yeah, you can, you can do it. And if you need to, if you know HTML, you can actually go in and edit it directly there to get some online conversions as well. You can copy and paste your Word document into a browser. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And this will actually load Word documents and then let you, you add your own merge fields, but it's, it's iffy how good that conversion is. Yeah, from Word to HTML. So we don't tend to recommend that we tend to recommend start with our templates and, and you know make what changes you need within a sort of a more simple format. You know, the, you know, the receipts are, are a much more complicated layout. I'm not sure which one this is. Yeah, this is a, oh, this is a US one. It's got this IRS wording. It just depends where, where I've got the location set to currently in the program. But I'll just show you that. There are some things for Canada English only, but also Quebec bilingual or Quebec French only. And we also do some special things for Australia and New Zealand that have some special requirements. And, you know, you can see there's there's a lot of options in the program in all different kinds of options. Sorry about the phone there. Talk about reports, talk about receipts for receipts can be done, you know, one at a time or they can be done all at the year and for all donors, certain ways of filtering them. Some of the power that I was talking about, you know, and simple powerful affordable comes in with with stuff like filtering and sorting. If you pop up filter. You know, I might want something like category one equals member to see only the ones that we've marked as a as a member in the database in that cat donor in a donor donor category field and then that just restricts the restricts the record shown or maybe I want it sorted backwards, you know, no reason but I'm just showing you, you know, the way you can, you can deal with some of these things and then you can memorize that with its own name for later reuse. These are fairly obvious things but but it does, it does give you some power user features for those who need them. On the other hand, we have an awful lot of our users who are, oh, I'm 80 years old and I'm not very good with computers. And mostly those people seem to manage using it to we got a lot of, you know, we're, we really try to make it as easy as possible for at least the core features. That's definitely part of our design and of course there's all the backup stuff as well as emailing backups, internet backups, and then, you know, great deal of help there's demo videos. And so another thing I want to talk about is sharing your database obviously, you know, that the simplest version is just installed for one user right. Let me just stop the screen share for a sec so we're not. Yes, it is prompting me to do a backup so I don't forget. Yeah, so, you know, early on we realized that, you know, not every user is going to be on just one computer. So we started developing ways to do that and, you know, the really lousy way to do that is install the program on two computers and backup and restore your database between them. Being very careful to keep track of who's got the official copy so that you're not making independent changes on independent copies of a database. So that was, you know, the first solution but it's pretty lousy like I said because it's dangerous. So the next thing we did was something called a cloud storage service, which basically completely automates that transferring and basically locks, who's got control of it at a given moment. So that only one person can be doing editing and when they exit the program it releases their lock and then another user can get it and they automatically get downloaded the backup that was made by the first user. And so a lot of people use that the next thing we did was something that we call the remote database version where the databases on a server but the program is still on your computer. And that allows multiple users to use it simultaneously, which is great and doing data entry for those, you know, people that are, you know, a lot busier that might need that. But the problem is because all your data is going up and down over the internet. It's slow, it's kind of painfully slow. So in retrospect we sort of think that was a bad idea, but it was the best we could do at the time a few years ago when we came out with that. And I didn't mention there's also a local network version. The local network version is for use just on a network within, you know, one set of offices or whatever. And that also allows multiple simultaneous users and doesn't sort of have any other concern that's very fast. And the most recent thing we released, which is was in just this December was something called the on demand version which basically runs entirely on a server and servers that we provide actually they they're from that same company ACS that I mentioned our online donation system comes from, they provide the servers. And basically use a just a very small remote control application to to run the program so obviously it's a little slower because it's remote control, but it's not like transferring your data up and down over the internet which is really slow. So it's really actually quite quite acceptably fast unless you know you're on dialogue or something. And that that's seeming to be really popular we're going to be trying to remove move everybody that's on the remote database version to the on demand version because it'll be a lot a lot nicer. So let's just look at the show you the accounts program for for a minute or two here as well which Okay, so here's accounts, you know you did see the picture of it before. And we've got you know, these are kind of the most common options that we've got here, the the single action, or single transaction windows, editing the chart of accounts. And if you look at account I'll show you just a revenue account say, as you can see this is a database that I just used for play. So this parent account defines the structure how they're indented over here, and then this is the fund that it's attached to and basically what happens is that any transaction on this revenue account automatically and implicitly changes the balance in the general fund because that's the fund. And that's what allows it to always have completely up to date fund balances so that you know this is how much I've got in my general fund. This is how much I've got in say building funds library fun now this is, you know probably more for a church, but you know it's very much churches and charities it just depends what you're doing. And then. Sorry, click the wrong button. If I go to a fund income statement for let's see last year is probably okay. Well magic is in the reporting here that again this was showed very quickly on the video. But what you see is that for each fund, of course there's an integrated income statement as well but for each fund you get your, your revenue and expenses and net income but then, and this is the piece that you just there's no way to get this without exporting to excel and doing it completely manually in something like quick books quick and simply accounting, etc. But this section the starting balance for the fund the net income for the period. There's a row for if you did any direct transfers in or out of the fund like between money transferring money between funds, and the ending balance for the fund and that's to me like this is the biggest selling point of our accounts program is this the funds stuff that it's just so completely automated and there's no journal entries needed to maintain the fund balances it's just, it just works basically. Another thing that is really nice for, for churches and charities especially charities is this thing here you can associate, you can associate accounts with lines on government forms like say the T 30 tan. And you'll see we've got some of them set up and others not set up in this particular sample database. And then basically you can get reporting. Oh, this is the chart of accounts one this isn't the actual, the actual report of the amounts where did that one go summary government form amounts. I picked the wrong button on that message. And you know, obviously there's not a lot of data here, but whatever the amounts are that go on these particular lines of your T 30 tan. There they are it doesn't do that the T 30 tan but it gives you amounts for it coming out of your accounting program. One thing I didn't mention is that the donation program has a bank deposits feature. And again this would be more for well actually for anybody whose money isn't coming in entirely electronically if you're getting cash or checks. You can determine your bank deposit, then you can export that as a summary transaction and imported into the accounts program. And if they're both on the same program it actually launches that import automatically. So I think that's the main thing. Just think about if there's anything else really important here that we haven't talked about things like database validation and validating make sure nothing's gone wrong with any of your transactions. There's not so much importing here because it's really, it's really tricky to import but it does import in in quickens IIF format. All the reports, different actions, etc. Okay, so I think that's sort of the, you know, the core bits and pieces that I wanted to tell you about. And let's just open it up for for any questions. If anyone has any questions feel free to put it in the chat or you can jump off mute as well if you like. I did have a question. So our charity deals has chapters, and each chapter kind of works autonomously. But we roll everything up so I'm wondering if there's any, is there like features where we can have multiple charities using the system but not necessarily seeing what everyone else is doing just so that they don't kind of get confused with, like, you know, yeah, yeah, we're not, we're not aiming at that type of organization if it's not one set of books. Then, then basically the answer is no, because there's no roll up you can have each charity could have its own database but there's no roll up. No way to integrate data between those databases. So yeah I see that question the chat what are what are other systems that are used and what are the pros and cons of division well you know I mean obviously that's an enormous question. One thing we do do. I'm just going to go back to the screen is on the website. We have links page links on each programs website. We have some links to pages, you know, for instance cap Tara is a big sort of amalgamator of lists of software. And then some links to specific ones, specific, some specific other ones that we know of, you know, we don't want people to feel like, you know, hey, we're the only, the only game in town because we're absolutely not and, you know, so there's a similar page for the donation program. We're definitely not the only game in town and like I said we're aimed at the lower end for donation, because the core final product is receipts. It's for churches and charities nonprofits. Yeah, some nonprofits might use it, but if you're not creating tax receipts. You know, I'd have a question about why we would be the best choice. And, you know, we're not trying to be a full church management program we're also not trying to be a sophisticated fundraising program. We, you know, there's mail merge correspondence, but it's not doing things like tracking correspondence it's not tracking campaigns other than if you track them by, you know, a donation category or something like that say that you know this was a donation for a certain purpose that came out of a certain campaign. So, you know we're not aiming that at that sort of you know high end of people that have a lot of requirements. Yeah, it sounds great. It sounds like a definitely a great option for the smaller charities and church. Yeah, exactly. You get a lot of people telling us we love this program and that's so gratifying, you know, when you get that we've got to actually a testimonials page again on each half of the website, the two programs with things that people have said. So that's, that's really kind of fun when when we get a nice comment that's more than one sentence long to ask if we can put it up there. Well, I'm guessing that's it for questions and I noticed a couple people are starting to drop off so I put your contact information at the top here I'll paste it again for anyone. Yeah, who wants to reach out to you, it's awesome on the Meetup Group. And again, thank you Dan that was really helpful and insightful and I think a lot of people enjoyed it. And thank you to everyone for joining us and I put my contact information there as well if anyone has any ideas for future featured events that you'd like to see or any demos you'd like to see or any topics you're interested in having covered I'm always looking for ideas to help bring you guys more value. So, we do have our next event scheduled for one, say, February 10. We have Chris Pindari joining us to let us know how to best use platforms like Upwork and PopTow and Fiverr to use contract help and work workers in our nonprofits to help us expand our organizations. And thank you for having me Sandra and thanks to all of you for coming. And I see there's a question from Joel, who I know from other sources. The programs are all install Windows software, but the new on demand version that I mentioned because it's a remote control to the server. There's a remote control client that works on Mac. So this is actually our first good way to run the program on Macs is still going to look like a Windows program once you get into the remote control. But that's not such a bad thing, but it runs the client program runs on your Mac. So, so this is a that's really a selling point for that as well as just the ability to, you know, install it quickly and easily be you never have to upgrade the software is another cool thing with the on demand because we get it updated on the servers right. So yeah. Anyways, thanks you all for coming. Great. Thanks again. Thank you everyone. And enjoy the rest of your Wednesday. Take care.