This is the week before our school’s spring fundraiser, and in a few days our volunteer treasurer will be buried under a pile of cash envelopes, a shaky spreadsheet and a wildly active group chat of “did you get my check?” messages. If you have run a nonprofit, parent-teacher association, sports club or other volunteer organization with money, you’ll recognize this scenario. The good news is that there are better tools for managing collections than this. The challenge is figuring out what to look for in the many available options.
There are many better tools available to deal with administrative tasks of NonProfits and Schools. The challenge is to figure out what matters for different Software when evaluating them for use in a nonprofit or school.
Step 1. People over Features
While a treasurer would hopefully be able to compare features of different nonprofit payment processing platforms, the reality is that features are only useful if the nonprofit can actually use them. Most nonprofits do not have dedicated IT staff on hand. In fact, many treasurers are volunteers who give up their Saturday mornings to take care of administrative tasks for their organizations. If a payment processing platform requires a tutorial longer than the treasurer has to spend on their budget meeting, then that platform is not worth the time.
The first factor to consider is how you will administer the new payment processing system. The volunteers and treasurer of your nonprofit or club have better things to do with their time than to learn to administer a new payment processing system. Will you need to hire an IT person to set up a new system or download a 20 minute tutorial and administer to a group of volunteers at a Saturday morning meeting? That would be a huge waste of time and money. Administering the system should be easy for the administrator. Put that at the top of your checklist.
Nothing is worse than an organization adopting a payment solution after a very promising demo only to have it collect dust 3 months later because the treasurer does not know how to do a refund.
Convenient payment options for PAYERS!!!
For the supporters – The donors, members, students’ parents of an organization are the most important group of people when evaluating tools for money collection within an organization. This group is made up of busy people, and they want to give money, to join an organization, to sign up for an event as easily and as fast as possible. Thus, when searching for payment processing systems for non-profits, for clubs, for PTAs, etc., you should search for systems that allow your supporters to pay as easily as possible for joining an organization, for paying for a good or a service, for donating. This would include systems that have: 1) mobile-friendly payment processing systems, 2) simple forms for one-time payments and recurring payments, 3) simple checkout processes, and 4) no account required for payers.
Consider payment options for your community that make easy payments by phone and fill out simple online forms for registration and donations. Many registration systems require account setup for single payments of say $25. Most people will not go through the hassle of creating an account, downloading an app and going through 3 pages of confirmation for a single payment of $25.
What to compare when you’re evaluating options
Nonprofit specific tools can have features or price points that don’t fit your organizations financial practices. Nonprofit donation processing software, for example, may have features for tracking receipts and following up with donors that don’t apply to your school or club fundraisers. There are also nonprofit management software options for non-profits. But tools for non-profits don’t necessarily translate to community organizations run by volunteers.
| Feature | Why it matters for community groups | Red flag to watch for |
| Simple setup | Volunteers need to get started without technical help | Requires IT configuration or developer access |
| Mobile-friendly payments | Most payers will use a phone | Desktop-only or clunky mobile experience |
| Automatic receipts | Reduces admin follow-up and builds trust | Manual confirmation only |
| Payment tracking dashboard | Treasurer can see who’s paid at a glance | No real-time reporting or export options |
| Transparent fee structure | No budget surprises at month-end | Hidden fees or confusing pricing tiers |
Transparency and recordkeeping you can actually trust
Cash and checks create the biggest problem with money collection: cash and checks create large gaps in your record of who paid what when. This creates huge problems for the administrators of the collection as it is often very difficult to determine the information above after the fact.
There are some things to consider when looking for a payment processing platform for your organization. First, the platform should be able to report in real time who has paid and who hasn’t. The organization’s records for each payment should be kept in such a way that they can be exported for use in the organization’s bookkeeping software. The platform should automatically generate and distribute receipts to those who have paid. It is also important that the less work that an administrator has to do to process a payment the better. The less time spent by administrators dealing with payment processing the better. The less time spent by administrators dealing with a collection the better. When a collection is opened up, the platform should automatically distribute receipts to those who have paid in the collection and the administrators for the collection should have a list of those who haven’t. This list can then be used to send follow up emails or make follow up phone calls to the members and/or donors who haven’t paid. This can help to cut down on the amount of time spent by the administrators dealing with the people who haven’t paid. It can also help to cut down on the amount of time spent by the administrators dealing with “I paid” emails and phone calls.
For organizations such as PTAs, community centers, or sports teams that report their finances to a board or school administration, the ability for their records to be fully exportable is not a nice to have, it is a must have.
Security and trust: non-negotiable
To online process money, the non-profit organization’s web-site will have to utilize standard security practices for online payment processing. If the payment processing platform supports encrypted transactions (i.e. – transactions in which the online financial information of the user (i.e. – sensitive data such as a user’s credit card numbers and/or banking account information) that is transmitted from the user’s computer to the web-site at which the user completes online transactions (i.e. – payments) is encoded so that no one other than the web-site at which the user completed the transaction(s) online can read the financial information of the user, then that would be a feature of great value.
- Look for platforms that are PCI-compliant
- Confirm that payer card data is never stored on the organization’s end
- Check whether the platform has a visible privacy policy that’s actually readable
- Ask whether funds are transferred directly to your account or held by a third party
Holding a community organization’s funds for extended periods of time can negatively affect an organization’s cash flow. It’s best to investigate payment processing tools that will enable you to receive the funds collected on your behalf as quickly as possible.
A few final things worth checking
Once you have filtered down the various payment processing options through the key considerations, it is then worth looking at a number of additional factors. These may seem less important at first but they can have a large impact on the usability of a payment processing system for a particular organization.
- Can you collect custom information alongside payment (t-shirt sizes, dietary needs, volunteer preferences)?
- Does the platform support multiple payment types, including card and bank transfer?
- Is there a way to set payment deadlines or caps on spots?
- What does customer support actually look like if something goes wrong on collection day?
There will be some platform that is absolutely perfect for your community, organization, club or group and there will be other platforms that will be a huge disappointment. So, let’s outline some criteria that will help guide you through the evaluation process and give you a general idea whether a certain payment processing platform will be worth your while or not. Your primary goal is to make the Saturday mornings of your treasurer a little shorter. That’s what it’s all about. In the end, it’s up to you to make a good decision. The decision as to which platform to go with will make or break your organization’s financial records and the way the money is managed within your organization. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that the way the money is being managed does not destroy your community’s trust. This is a high bar to get over but it is worth it.
