Setup Checklist

This is a sequenced checklist for a brand-new NP Ledger organization. Work through the steps in order — each one builds on the previous one, and doing them out of order usually means backing up later to fix something. If you want the product overview first, start with Welcome to NP Ledger. If you're ready to set up, start here.

A set of books that are set up carefully in the first week will save you hours of correction work in the first year. The fields you fill in during onboarding determine how your reports are organized, how your donors see their receipts, and how your auditor will navigate your ledger. Rushing through setup is the single most common source of cleanup work for small nonprofits moving to new accounting software.

The seven-step sequence below is the order NP Ledger's own Getting Started guide uses at /getting-started/. Each step links out to the dedicated guide for that topic so you can dive deeper.

Step 1: Set up your organization

Confirm your organization's legal name, EIN, and fiscal year start date. Upload a logo if you have one — it will appear on statements, reports, and donor receipts. These fields are easier to set correctly once than to update across every already-issued document later.

Do this in: Settings > Organization Settings

Read more: Setting Up Your Organization

Step 2: Review your chart of accounts

NP Ledger creates a starter chart of accounts automatically when your organization is created. Before you post any transactions, take a look at it. The starter chart covers the categories most nonprofits use, but every organization has a few unique accounts — a signature grant, a specific program expense, a particular revenue stream — that you'll want to add. You can also rename accounts to match the language your board uses.

Do this in: Managing Books > Chart of Accounts

Read more: Chart of Accounts

Step 3: Set up your funds

Funds are how NP Ledger tracks donor restrictions. At minimum you'll want a General Fund for unrestricted operations. If you have restricted gifts or grants, create a Restricted Fund for each one (or groups of related restrictions, depending on how fine-grained you want to track). If your board has designated a portion of your reserves for a specific future purpose, create a Board-Designated Fund to track it.

If you don't know what a fund is yet, read What Is Fund Accounting? before continuing — it's the conceptual model the rest of NP Ledger is built on.

Do this in: Managing Books > Funds and Programs

Read more: Funds and Programs

Step 4: Add your supporters and vendors

Supporters are the donors, grantors, and members who give to your organization. Vendors are the people and companies you pay. Both live in the Contacts list. You don't need to add every supporter up front — they'll be created automatically as donations come in via your donation connections — but if you're migrating from another system, import your existing contact list now so historical giving can be tied to the right records.

Do this in: Managing Books > Contacts

Step 5: Enter your first transaction

NP Ledger offers two ways to record a transaction. Use Quick Entry for a simplified, plain-language form that walks you through the most common actions (received donation, paid expense, received bill, paid bill, received in-kind contribution, recorded payroll). Use the full transaction form when you need fine-grained control over the debits and credits — typically for journal entries, opening balances, or complex multi-line entries.

If your fiscal year started before today, you'll also want to enter opening balances so the ledger reflects the correct starting position for each account.

Do this in: Recording Transactions > Quick Entry (or the transaction form)

Read more: Quick Entry, Adding Your Bank Accounts

Step 6: Run your first report

Once you have a handful of transactions in, run three reports to make sure the books look right:

• Trial Balance — verify that total debits equal total credits. This should always pass; if it doesn't, stop and investigate.
• General Ledger — verify that your transactions posted to the accounts you expected.
• Statement of Activities — verify that revenue and expenses are showing up in the right columns (with vs. without donor restrictions).

Do this in: Reports

Read more: Trial Balance, General Ledger, Statement of Activities

Step 7: Explore advanced features

Once the basics are working, you can turn on the advanced features that make NP Ledger a serious accounting system rather than a simple ledger:

• Donation Connections — link Stripe, PayPal, Givebutter, or Donorbox so donations record automatically via webhooks.
• Bank Feeds — connect Mercury, Teller, or another supported provider so bank transactions flow in automatically.
• Voice Entry — dictate a transaction aloud and let NP Ledger extract the fields.
• Recurring Transactions — schedule regular entries like rent or monthly payroll.
• Bank Reconciliation — monthly reconciliation against statement data is the single most important internal control for small-organization bookkeeping.
• 990 Tax Filing Wizard — a guided workflow for preparing Form 990 when your filing season arrives.
• AI Help — available on every page, context-aware, and grounded in your actual data. Ask it to explain a report, walk you through a workflow, or sanity-check a journal entry.

• Your Statement of Financial Position balances (assets = liabilities + net assets) and reflects your actual starting position.
• Fund balances match the restricted gifts you know about. If you received a $50,000 restricted grant last year, you should see $50,000 (or the remaining balance after spending) in that fund.
• A test transaction flows through to the right report columns. Post a small test donation, a small test expense, and confirm both appear where you expect on the Statement of Activities and the General Ledger.

• Skipping fund setup. If you post donations before creating your funds, everything lands in the General Fund by default. That's fine if all your money is unrestricted, but if some of it is restricted, you'll need to go back and reclassify — which is exactly the kind of cleanup work careful setup avoids.
• Entering opening balances twice. If you're migrating from another system, enter opening balances once, via a single dated journal entry. Don't also import the prior period's transactions if you've already recorded the resulting balances.
• Running reports before posting. Draft transactions don't appear on reports. If a number is missing, check whether the underlying entry is still in Draft.
• Trying to configure everything before entering any transactions. You'll learn more about what you need by running a transaction through the system than by staring at settings pages. Once you're past Step 3, start posting real or test entries — you can always adjust settings later.