Using QB to manage a fund-raising auction

[Claire Petersky]

We just finished up with our agency’s annual benefit dinner and auction. This is the second year we’ve run the whole thing with slews of excel spreadsheets, and there’s all kinds of headaches, even with fancy pivot tables. I’ve considered buying various sorts of auction software, but most of the popular kinds seem to cost thousands of dollars that we simply don’t have. Then there’s some odd little programs that are out there that claim to manage auctions, but who knows if they work OK, and there’d be a fair bit of brain damage to learn how they work. I have a volunteer who says he’ll write an auction database, which is kind of him, but my experience is that database volunteers leave, and then there’s no support, and then we’ve got an albatross that doesn’t work, or doesn’t work right, and no way to fix it or maybe even get the data out.

We use Quickbooks Pro for our agency’s bookkeeping now. I'm posting here, because I am more likely to reach other nonprofit organizations. It strikes me that we could use Quickbooks Pro to manage our auction - just open up another company.

“Vendors” would be all the auction donors
“Customers” would be all the auction attendees
“Items and Services” would be the auction items


We could generate all kinds of letters, reports, sales slips the night of, etc.

Everything would export to Excel and pdfs, so all members of the auction committee could read the reports without having to own quickbooks.

Unlike auction software, which costs thousands – sometimes, every freakin’ year as it is sold as a software service, it’s about $70 for 2008 Quickbooks Pro. And we already know how to use quickbooks, so the learning curve would be much smaller. The books for the auction would be kept completely separate from the agency’s books.

Is this nutsy of me? Has anyone run a fundraising auction using QB? Thoughts?

[JZeiger]

Get a copy of Running QB in Nonprofits by Ivens, which covers tracking events. You could use a class named events and a subclass for each event, or use a two-sided item for each event. Either way, you get detailed reports on the income and expenses.