We purchased both last year. At that time, we had three separate accounts, one general, one playground and one garden club. Our treasurer could never make the financial one work for her. I never took the time to look it over so I have no clue if it was her, the system, or that we were trying to do three accounts on one.
As for the volunteer manager, that was my baby and in theory, it should have been awesome. Through no fault of the program, it wasn't so good for me, I had no time to update anything. Or rather, I just chose to spend my time in other areas.
If you have someone dedicated to making it work, it is awesome and a great tool. It is wonderful to be able to look up on line and find the exact volunteers I needed or a phone number, etc without having to be on the network at school or finding a print out of an excel list like I had done previously. Unfortunately, the cost is prohibitive to just have those lists available and not use it for record keeping also.

pres again!;134008 wrote: Just wondering who has used this in the past, especially the money manager, and how they liked it. We want to switch this year from the reallyl bad software we have to this.

I don't think there is a better way to manage volunteers, at least not without doing a lot of your own programming and coming up with a completely custom application. Security is a non-issue, IMO, and IME, with this program. I am also sold on the Finance Manager, but our treasurer will not give up Quicken and Excel.

The best part, to us, is the ability to quickly contact any or all members, and the ability to carry data over from year to year. Instead of re-enlisting 200 people, we are only dealing with 20-30 new people and information updates (and there is the ability for members to sign up on-line.

The only things I wish the program had are: the ability to run reports on previous years' data, and some sort of log or record of the e-mails sent.

Last year, as PTO treasurer, I ran Finance Manager and Quicken in parallel all year. I'd used Quicken for years and it was hard to cut the cord completely to switch 100% to Finance Manager. Running them in parallel gave me a chance to see side by side how the two systems compared (though of course it meant I had to post every transaction twice, once in both systems).

I wholeheartedly recommend Finance Manager for any PTO. It is so basic, it might look too simplistic, but that's acutally its strength. It has just what a PTO needs, and nothing more. There are no extraneous bells and whistles that companies have to package into their commercial "work in any environment" systems like Quicken, MS Money, or Quickbooks.

Quicken is a great product, of course. And though I made it work for our PTO, I had to force myself to ignore lots of unused icons and features that clutter the system. When I upgraded a couple years ago, I had to relearn all over which features don't apply to us since Quicken packed in a bunch of new features. As the outgoing treasurer, I've had to deal with the issue of making sure the new treaurer has Quicken installed on her computer, too. The official CD that the PTO bought years ago has long been lost. A few years ago the new treasurer wanted to use Quickbooks so all of a sudden reports looked different for our members, and the treasurer who followed Ms. Quickbooks was stuck teaching herself Quicken becuase her predecessor only knew Quickbooks, not Quicken. The benefit of Finance Manager is the smooth transtion that comes from a web-based application that is easy to learn and specifically suited for the PTO.

I especially encourage a PTO to look seriously at Finance Manager if you are trying to manage your finances on paper or just Excel. Fin Man is so easy to use and it will give you loads more information, better data integrity, easier and faster bank reconciliation, and encourage your PTO to run a bit more professionally. It seems to work best if you define a budget at the start of the year (though it's not required), which in turn forces your PTO to plan. That's a good thing. You don't need to be a computer guru or accountant to use it. Once you set up your budget, headings, and categories, most of what you do the rest of the year is pretty repetitive. Since it's web-based, you don't have to be at one certain computer to do the work.

Is it perfect? Honestly, I'll say no. But no system is. If I could change a few things, I would start with a couple of the report layouts. We have a very long budget, which forces our reports to go to 2 pages. I'm not keen on the way the Performance to Budget report looks when it page breaks. And there are a few words choices that bug me, but I've used another system (Quicken) for years and it's just a matter of getting familiar with someone else's terminology. Nothing is a show-stopper.

I'm starting as treasurer in a new PTO this year, and I'll be using Finance Manager exclusively.

The Volunteer Builder is great (when used to it's full potential)! Unfortunately I was unable to understand the Finance Manager. It is a bit pricy... but geared towards PTO's. it's hard to find anything else out there that works!

Volunteer Builder is great! Unfortunately I was unable to understand that Finance Manager side if it. It is a bit pricy... but geared toward PTO's.

Enthusiastically embracing my new position as PTO treasurer last summer, I set up some awesome Excel spreadsheets and a Quickbooks program for our PTO. They worked okay, however, a couple weeks into the school year, we opted to go with the Finance Manager module of PTO Manager. Since it is designed for PTOs, there are no issues of "making it work". The program is very user friendly and the best part is the web accessibility, so I could answer questions from my computer at work, at home, or at school.

The program makes bank reconciliation a snap, too. I set up all of our officers to be able to access Finance Manager. I have nothing but praise for this program and highly recommend it. It just makes life simple and easier, at a very affordable cost!

All of our PTO officers were new last year, so we didn't use the Volunteer Builder module, but it looks similarly impressive.