FOSS for non-profit organisations

[Archived] FOSS for non-profit organisations

FOSS United helps non-profit organisations get access to a large number of business tools that help them manage their day to day affairs easily, everything from HR, payroll, and accounting to customer relations and communications. We do this by offering cloud hosting of the free and open source ERPNext suite and training and onboarding at a nominal cost.

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What is an ERP?

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a suite of business, resource, and process management tools that an organisation uses to run its day to day affairs. For example, for a non-profit organisation: accounting, donation and membership management, support tickets and newsletters, HR (full time & volunteer) management, contact and customer management, website hosting, event management, project management, training programmes etc.

Here is a sneak preview of some of the countless features ERPNext offers out of the box.

Accounting

Through accounting, you can record and manage financial transactions and taxes easily. The accounting process includes summarizing, analyzing and reporting the financial transactions to oversight agencies, regulators and tax collection entities.

ERPNext helps manage cash flows in one place, right from recording transactions to summarizing and analyzing financial reports.

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Donations and membership

Donations and memberships for general public can be an important source of not only income, but community participation and goodwill, for a non-profit organisation.

ERPNext comes with donation and membership features that help organisations collect and manage donations and membership fees easily. Screenshot

Payment gateway integration Donors and members can choose to pay using any credit/debit card, UPI, Netbanking, Paytm Wallet. Payment gateway integration allows processing transactions with the payment gateway providers like Razorpay, Paytm, PayPal and Stripe. Screenshot

Website

ERPNext allows you to manage not just an organisation's backend processes, but its website, from the same dashboard. Publish pages and posts, web forms, create events easily with the built in portal system.

For instance, this whole website is published from ERPNext.

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Use the built in newsletter and mailing lists feature for community engagement. Manage separate lists for customers, recipients, volunteers, employees etc.

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After creating email groups, it is easy to send newsletters to those groups by simply writing the subject and content of the newsletters.

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Human Resource (and volunteer) management

With the ERPNext HR module, it is easy to manage leave, attendance, expense claims, recruitment of new volunteers among many other things that a non-profit organisation would need. Screenshot

Project management

ERPNext makes it easy to create, track, and assign tasks to the members and volunteers. Easily generate reports of daily timesheets, billing summaries etc. Screenshot

Contacts

Create and manage contacts with fields such as name, email address, phone number, contact address, bank account details etc. Screenshot

Customization

Apart from these, there are numerous other interconnected out-of-the-box modules in ERPNext that can be used to efficiently run an organisation. In addition, it allows customisation to a large extent right from its dashboard UI. For example, adding custom fields to different record (doc) types.

Beyond that, an organisation can seek the services of an ERPNext expert, or build in house technical capacity to customize it in any way that suits their needs.

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