PTA software recommendations

[tonysemail]

I didn't know that PTA software was a thing until hearing about it last week.
My PTA is thinking about buying a program with an annual subscription cost.
The problem they want to solve is that large spreadsheets fail because they take a lot of time for the volunteers.
It's tedious and mistakes are found during audit.
I advocated for using something free which can import transactions from an online banking account.
My suggestion was waveapps.com which I use for tracking rental property.

My questions to the forum-
Do you use specialized software to run your PTA?
What do you recommend and why?
Is it free or are there annual subscription costs?

[sjc0816]

I'm Treasurer of our PTA and we use Quickbooks. We have used QB as long as I have been involved (6 years). We also have a pretty tight process in place with a paper trail for every check written and deposit made...so there are rarely errors. When I reconcile QB each month, I run profit-and-loss reports that we present to the PTA at each meeting. QB makes this very simple. We also have a line item in our annual budget for PTA Treasurer administration....which pays for things like Quickbooks, checks, deposit slips, etc.

Is that helpful?

[tonysemail]

Thanks for the info.   Does this import transactions from an online bank account or do you manually enter each transaction?

QB monthly subscription does seem less than the annual price quoted.   

[sjc0816]

I am fairly certain that there is the ability to import transactions from your bank account into Quickbooks (our version of QB is old)....but we don't utilize that. We enter everything in manually and the reconcile against our bank statements.