Product Fundraising Software

[Meeples]

We run a small two person business in fundraising distributorship, and we're slowly starting to realise that we're beginning to spend far too much time on paperwork.

We mostly market to schools and small individual groups, local youth sports and the like. Currently, we send a spreadsheet out that is used by a client to keep track of individual childrens' sales. They enter the data, send it back to us, then we prepare an invoice from that and send it to them. Included in the spreadsheet book are individual 'pick sheets', one per selling child, that we put along with the individual childrens' orders when delivered.

Part of the problem is that we offer multiple products, and that each client wishes different things. Some may want to only sell one product line, others two or three - we then are sending out multiple spreadsheets to clients, which we then have to collate so as to prepare a single invoice, and it swift becomes a bothersome mess for both them and us.

Is there any sort of software out there that could make this work better for us? Open-source would be great, but we're willing to pay if the solution looks worthwhile. Just looking for anything to make this smoother on all involved in the fundraising process!

 

[bigdogchris]

I see what your problem is, but could you be a little more specific in describing what the perfect solution would do for you?

 

[Meeples]

I guess I see two major things I'd like corrected. If there is some magical software package out there that works well for it, it would be amazing, but even just suggestions on how to better set things up would be great. We're not the most technically inclined, though we've managed to slowly figure some things out and build a teetering house of twigs.

1. Every little thing we do involves opening another document. After a sale is through, we're keeping track of a group's sales and profits by using another spreadsheet and adding the data to it, and so forth. Something that would 'bring this all together' and automate the process further than we know how to do with Excel would be great

2. Multi-product sales. To have a book for every permutation possible would be a great headache, and I'd love if there were some way to smooth over or eliminate this issue. No client wants to deal with multiple books if they are selling different product categories, nor do we when we get them back, so it's a bit of a hassle for all involved. To generate a sales book from a selection of product categories for a client, I think that's what we'd look for here - or anything else that seems a reasonable solution.

 

[PTNL]

Off-hand, I'd consider Quickbooks for this need -- but I would first need to deep-dive into their data import capabilities for ingesting sales info.