Kathy Hostler manages the finances for a few membership associations. She works with the association manager on keeping member records between the website and the accounting software.
In this review, Kathy shares the follwoing challenges she deals with working with Wild Apricot (for membership management) and Quickbooks (for accounting).
"Wild Apricot is very easy to work with once you figure out the kinks," says Kathy.
- It's hard to track deleted invoices (which require an accounting entry to remove the income effect). Workaround: Ask the assocition manager to notify you whenever an invoice is deleted.
- The reporting features are static. You can change the date range, but that is it. For Accounts Receivable, you can't change the date at all - it only reports on today's date. Workaround: Make sure you go in and run it on the last day of every month.
- Another problem with reporting: the report for invoices for the month only says "event registration" for each transaction - it doesn't tell you which event it relates to. This is an issue when you have several events going on at one time. Workaound: Make each event's price unique - $25 and $24.99, for example.
- We've had one instance where Wild Apricot says a transaction is fully paid, even though the transaction in PayPal did not go through. Something's wrong with the two systems talking to each other.
- Lastly, if I read the materials correctly, Wild Apricot says that it integrates with Quickbooks, but in order for that to work you have to have each member's record in Quickbooks. We don't find that necessary as that is the main reason for having Wild Apricot - it is the place where we maintain all of our member records. I wish that they had set it up so that it batch processed instead of downloading each members account. Workaround: Run the invoicing and payments reports in Wild Apricot, reconcile the activity to the financial transactions, and then post summary journal entries in Quickbooks.