- Starting price
- 15-day free trial, then $79/mo
- Free tier
- No
- Platforms
- Cloud web software (app.aplos.com). No mobile app is published on the pages reviewed.
- Developer
- Aplos Software, LLC (part of Velora)
- Launched
- 2009
- Updated
- Jul 26, 2026
The verdict
The strongest published case in this category for genuine fund accounting rather than business bookkeeping with labels bolted on, and at $79 a month the entry tier is within reach of a mid-sized church. Two things to check before you commit: Lite gives you two users and no third-party integrations or permission controls, and the terms you would want to read before handing over your books are not published at a reachable URL.
Try Aplos ↗Opens aplos.com
Aplos exists because of a specific, unglamorous problem. Tim Goetz, a CPA who was also serving as an executive pastor, could not find fund accounting software his own church could afford, so in 2009 he built it. That origin explains the product better than any feature list: Aplos is not business accounting software with a nonprofit skin, and the distinction is the entire reason this category exists.
What it does is true fund accounting - it separates restricted from unrestricted money automatically - and then produces the statements a church board and an auditor actually ask for: Balance Sheet by Fund, Income Statement by Fund, custom reports, bank reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable, budgeting, Form 990 mapping and 1099 management. Alongside the ledger sit the church-facing pieces: donation tracking with automatic giving statements, online giving forms, text-to-give, a secure donor portal, a people and donor database, and a Board Portal for sharing financials with trustees. Aplos claims 65,000-plus nonprofit and church professionals and describes itself as "Rated #1 Nonprofit accounting tool by G2 and Forbes."
Pricing is published cleanly, which in this category is worth noting. Lite is $79 a month, Core $129, Advanced $229, and above that a Custom tier quoted individually for organisations with $1 million or more in annual revenue. A 15-day free trial needs no credit card. A promotion running at the time of review took 50% off Lite and Core for three months with the code SUMMER26, valid through 31 July - Advanced and Custom were excluded.
The part most reviews skip is what has happened to the company. Aplos raised a $4 million Series A in 2016, reached its fiftieth team member by 2019, acquired the donor-management platform Keela in 2023 and the fundraising builder Raisely in 2024, and in 2025 all three were combined into Velora, described as "the first fully integrated cloud ecosystem for nonprofit operations." Velora sits within ASG, the software group backed by the private-equity firm Alpine Investors. So the company started by a pastor-CPA is now a brand inside a roll-up. That is not automatically bad news, and this review treats it as a genuine two-sided consideration rather than a warning.
✓ The good
- Real fund accounting, not tagging - restricted and unrestricted money are separated automatically, which is the one thing general-purpose bookkeeping software does badly and the whole reason to buy specialist software
- The reports a church board and auditor ask for come as standard - Balance Sheet by Fund and Income Statement by Fund are on the $79 Lite tier, not held back for an upgrade, along with custom reports and bank reconciliation
- Compliance work is built in - Form 990 mapping, audit-ready reporting and 1099 management, so the annual filing is a report rather than a reconstruction project
- Giving is included rather than a separate subscription - donation tracking with automatic giving statements, online giving forms, text-to-give, a secure donor portal and a people database, with online donation sync the vendor describes as "zero work required"
- A Board Portal on every tier from Lite up, which solves the very ordinary problem of getting current financials in front of trustees without emailing spreadsheets
- Pricing is published plainly for three of four tiers - $79, $129 and $229 a month with the included user counts stated, so a treasurer can budget without a sales call
- A 15-day free trial with "No credit card required. Cancel anytime.", which is the right way to let a treasurer test whether the fund structure matches how the church actually accounts
✗ Watch out
- The entry tier cannot connect to anything - "3rd Party Integrations" is a Core ($129/month) feature, so a church on Lite ($79) has no outside connections at all
- User roles and permissions are also Core-only - on Lite you cannot restrict what either of your two users can see or do, which is a real problem where a volunteer treasurer is one of them
- Seats are tight and overage cost is unpublished - Lite and Core include 2 users, Advanced 3, and the pricing page does not state the price of extra users. A church with a pastor, treasurer, bookkeeper and administrator cannot be costed from published information
- Payroll is not built in - it is delivered through a Gusto partnership and billed separately at unpublished cost, as are prepaid cards (Pex) and expense management (RAMP)
- Fixed Assets, Income and Expense Allocations, and Bill Approval are gated to the Custom tier only, with no published price - a mid-sized church needing fixed asset tracking has to enter a quote conversation
- The terms are not readable - aplos.com/legal-stuff returns 404 and the help centre is behind bot protection, so no refund policy, cancellation notice, auto-renewal or data-export-on-termination terms could be verified for software that holds a church's books
- Support hours are narrow - "Unlimited Customer Support" is advertised from Lite up, but the published window is Mon-Fri 7am-3pm Pacific, which is 10am-6pm Eastern, with no SLA or response-time commitment
Best for
- Churches with genuinely restricted funds to track
- Treasurers preparing board-ready financial statements
- Small teams of two or three finance users
- Churches that want giving and ledger in one place
Avoid if
- Four or more people need ledger access
- You need built-in payroll in one subscription
- Your bookkeeping is simple single-fund cash in and out
- You require published contract and refund terms
What Aplos is
Aplos is cloud fund-accounting software built for nonprofits, churches and foundations rather than adapted from business accounting. It runs in a browser at app.aplos.com. The ledger performs true fund accounting - automatically separating restricted from unrestricted funds - and produces nonprofit-specific statements including Balance Sheet by Fund and Income Statement by Fund, alongside bank reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable, budgeting, period close, Form 990 mapping and 1099 management.
For churches specifically it also handles the money coming in: donation tracking with automatic giving statements, online giving forms, text-to-give, a secure donor portal and a people and donor database, with online donation sync the vendor describes as "zero work required." A Board Portal shares financials with trustees, multi-factor authentication is included, and flexible tagging covers ministries, projects and events. Aplos is now marketed as the accounting pillar of Velora, alongside Keela for CRM and Raisely for fundraising.
Why churches need fund accounting and not ordinary bookkeeping
A church does not hold one pot of money. It holds several, and some of them are legally spoken for. When a member gives towards a building project, a mission trip or a bereavement fund, that gift is restricted: it cannot lawfully be spent on staff salaries or the electricity bill, no matter how tight the general fund gets. Fund accounting exists to make that distinction structural rather than a note in a spreadsheet - each fund behaves as its own self-balancing set of books, so you can print a balance sheet showing what the building fund actually holds today, separately from everything else.
Ordinary bookkeeping software cannot really do this. It offers classes, tags or tracking categories, which are reporting labels attached to transactions in a single entity-wide ledger. They will slice an income statement, but they will not give you a balance sheet per fund, and nothing stops a restricted balance being quietly consumed by unrestricted spending. Aplos separates restricted from unrestricted automatically and ships Balance Sheet by Fund and Income Statement by Fund on its cheapest tier. That is the whole argument for buying specialist software, and it is the argument most reviews of this category never bother to make.
Funds, dimensions and the reports a board actually reads
The fund layer is the foundation and it is present from $79 a month: automatic separation of restricted and unrestricted money, Balance Sheet by Fund, Income Statement by Fund, custom reports, bank reconciliation, 1099 management and a Board Portal, all on Lite. Core at $129 adds the machinery of ordinary accounting operations on top - basic budgeting, accounts payable, accounts receivable, recurring transactions and period close - and Advanced at $229 adds the analytical layer: budgeting by fund or grant, budgeting by department or project, dimensional budgeting and dimensional reporting. Flexible tagging for ministries, projects and events runs alongside, and Form 990 mapping plus audit-ready reporting handle the annual compliance cycle.
The practical value of that ladder is that it maps onto how a church grows rather than onto arbitrary feature bundling. A church with three restricted funds and a treasurer who needs a clean monthly statement is genuinely served by Lite. A church that has started running payables, closing periods properly and holding a budget needs Core, and that is a reasonable place to draw a line. Where it gets less comfortable is Advanced, which Aplos recommends by revenue - "organizations with 250K+ in annual revenue" - rather than by need. Revenue-based steering is common in this market, but it means a church that crosses a turnover threshold may be pushed towards $229 a month for dimensional budgeting it does not use. Buy on the reports you have to produce, not on the recommendation label.
What the tiers hold back, and the seat count problem
Two gates on the entry tier deserve to be stated bluntly, because they are easy to miss on a pricing table. First, "3rd Party Integrations" is a Core feature, which means a church on Lite cannot connect outside tools at all - and Aplos names a good many across its site: Gusto for payroll, Pex for prepaid cards, RAMP for expense management, Stripe Payments, Fifth Third Bank, DonorElf, Church Community Builder and Bloomerang, plus a public API, an Aplos Advisor network and a Tech Partners directory. None of that is reachable from the $79 tier. Second, User Roles & Permissions is also Core-only, so on Lite your two users both see everything. For a church where one of those two is a volunteer treasurer, that is a governance issue rather than an inconvenience.
The seat count is the harder problem. Lite and Core include two users. Advanced includes three. A very ordinary church finance arrangement - a pastor, a treasurer, an external bookkeeper and an administrator who enters invoices - is four people, and the pricing page does not state what an additional user costs. The help-centre article on adding and managing users could not be retrieved for this review, so the figure could not be verified from any published source. That is a genuine costing gap: for many churches the additional-user price will determine whether Aplos is cheaper or dearer than the alternatives, and it is the one number you cannot look up. Ask for it in writing during the 15-day trial, before you migrate a single ledger.
The Velora consolidation: what private-equity ownership means in both directions
The published history is straightforward. Founded in 2009, a $4 million Series A in 2016, a fiftieth team member by 2019, then two acquisitions in two years - Keela, a nonprofit CRM, in 2023, and Raisely, an online fundraising campaign builder, in 2024. In 2025, in Aplos's own words, "Aplos, Keela, and Raisely unite to form Velora, the first fully integrated cloud ecosystem for nonprofit operations." Velora sits inside ASG, backed by the private-equity firm Alpine Investors. Aplos is therefore a brand within a suite rather than an independent company, and the copyright notice reading 2024-2026 Aplos Software, LLC reflects a business that still trades under its own name inside a larger structure.
For a church choosing accounting software it intends to keep for ten years, this cuts both ways and should be weighed rather than feared. On the positive side, consolidation buys resources: an accounting product with a CRM and a fundraising platform beside it has a plausible route to genuinely integrated donor-to-ledger workflows, and a well-capitalised owner is less likely to abandon the product than a small independent vendor running out of runway. On the other side, roll-ups exist to build pricing power, and pricing power gets used at renewal - and only monthly pricing is displayed on the Aplos pricing page, with no annual option or discount published, so there is no multi-year price lock available to quote. Add the unreadable terms - aplos.com/legal-stuff returns 404 - and you cannot verify what notice you have to give, what happens to your data on termination, or how price changes are handled. The right response is not to rule Aplos out, which would be an overreaction to an ownership structure now common across the whole sector. It is to get the additional-user price, the renewal terms and the data-export position confirmed in writing before you commit your books.
Pricing
Lite
$79/mo
2 users. Balance Sheet by Fund, Income Statement by Fund, Bank Reconciliation, Custom Reports, Board Portal, 1099 Management and Unlimited Customer Support. No third-party integrations and no user roles or permissions - both start at Core. Promotional price of $39.50/month for three months with code SUMMER26, valid through 31 July.
Core
$129/mo
2 users. Everything in Lite plus Basic Budgeting, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Recurring Transactions, Period Close, 3rd Party Integrations and User Roles & Permissions. The first tier that behaves like a full accounting system. Promotional price of $64.50/month for three months with code SUMMER26.
Advanced
$229/mo
3 users. Everything in Core plus Budgeting by Fund or Grant, Budgeting by Department or Project, Dimensional Budgeting and Dimensional Reporting. Aplos recommends it for "organizations with 250K+ in annual revenue." No promotional discount applies to this tier.
Custom
Tailored Pricing
For "organizations with $1million+ in annual revenue." May include Income & Expense Allocations, Fixed Assets, Bill Approval, additional dimensions and additional users. Not published - quoted on revenue and required modules. Note that fixed assets and bill approval are available nowhere else.
Add-ons
Not published
Nonprofit and Church Bookkeeping Services ("Expert nonprofit and church bookkeeping") and Implementation Services are offered without published rates. Payroll runs through a Gusto partnership and prepaid expense cards through Pex - both third-party products billed separately, not included in the Aplos subscription.
Four tiers, three of them published. Lite $79 a month with 2 users, Core $129 with 2 users, Advanced $229 with 3 users, and a Custom tier quoted individually for organisations with $1 million or more in annual revenue. Aplos recommends Advanced for organisations above $250,000 in annual revenue, so the ladder is steered by turnover as well as by feature need.
Lite covers Balance Sheet by Fund, Income Statement by Fund, bank reconciliation, custom reports, the Board Portal, 1099 management and unlimited customer support. Core adds basic budgeting, accounts payable and receivable, recurring transactions, period close, third-party integrations and user roles and permissions. Advanced adds budgeting by fund or grant, budgeting by department or project, dimensional budgeting and dimensional reporting. Custom is where Fixed Assets, Income & Expense Allocations and Bill Approval live, with additional dimensions and additional users - none of it priced publicly.
The trial is 15 days with "No credit card required. Cancel anytime." At the time of review a promotion took 50% off for three months with the code SUMMER26 - $39.50 for Lite, $64.50 for Core - valid through 31 July and applying to those two tiers only. Advanced and Custom carried no discount. Treat that as a reason to start the trial before a deadline, not as a reason to choose a tier.
Three costs sit outside the subscription and none is published. Payroll runs through Gusto, prepaid expense cards through Pex, and both are third-party products billed separately. Nonprofit and church bookkeeping services and implementation services are offered without rates. And the price of users beyond the two or three included is not stated anywhere reachable, which for a four-person finance team is the difference between a $79 decision and something rather larger.
Only monthly pricing is displayed. No annual billing option or annual discount is published, so no multi-year commitment or price lock can be quoted here - and no refund policy, cancellation notice period, auto-renewal term or data-export-on-termination term is published at a reachable URL, since the legal page 404s and the help centre is behind bot protection. For a system of record holding a church's books, that is the most substantive transparency gap in the whole offer.
Where Aplos falls behind
The entry tier is more limited than $79 suggests. No third-party integrations and no user roles or permissions on Lite means the cheapest plan cannot connect to your bank feed tooling, your payroll, your donor CRM or anything else, and cannot stop either of its two users from seeing everything. It is a competent standalone fund ledger; it is not a connected finance system. Budget for Core at $129 if your church needs either capability, and most do.
Seat limits are the weakest part of the pricing model. Two users on Lite and Core, three on Advanced, and no published price for more. Church finance is usually a small committee rather than one person, and the inability to cost a four-user configuration from published material is a genuine obstacle to comparing Aplos against alternatives on paper.
The terms are not published anywhere you can read them. The legal page returns 404 and the help centre is behind bot protection. Refunds, cancellation notice, auto-renewal, data ownership and export on termination, price-change terms - none verifiable. Every one of those matters more for accounting software than for most categories, because migrating a ledger mid-year is genuinely painful and the leverage sits with whoever holds the data.
Support is advertised as unlimited but bounded by the clock. "Unlimited Customer Support" from Lite up, no SLA, and published hours of Mon-Fri 7am-3pm Pacific on 888-274-1316. That is an eight-hour weekday window, and for an East Coast church it closes at 6pm with nothing at weekends - which is when volunteer treasurers most often do the books.
The vendor discloses no limitations of its own. The church accounting page positions Aplos as "true fund accounting" without stating what it does not do, and lists no exclusions. That is normal marketing practice, but it puts the whole burden of finding the gates - integrations on Core, permissions on Core, fixed assets on Custom, payroll at Gusto - on the buyer reading the comparison table carefully.
Aplos vs. Rock RMS vs. general-purpose bookkeeping software
Against general-purpose bookkeeping software, the difference is structural rather than cosmetic. Mainstream small-business accounting packages track restricted giving with classes, tags or tracking categories - labels on transactions inside one entity-wide ledger. They will produce a filtered income statement, but they will not produce a balance sheet per fund, and nothing in the design prevents restricted money being spent on unrestricted costs. Aplos separates restricted from unrestricted automatically and ships Balance Sheet by Fund and Income Statement by Fund on its $79 tier, with Form 990 mapping and 1099 management alongside. If your church holds designated gifts, that is the reason to pay for specialist software rather than the cheaper generalist.
Against Rock RMS, these are complements rather than competitors, and churches confuse them regularly. Rock is the operational system of record - people, check-in, groups, events, communications, website - and it does include finance tools for giving and contributions. What it is not is a nonprofit general ledger with fund-level statements and 990 mapping. A large church may perfectly reasonably run Rock for ministry operations and Aplos for the books. The cost shapes are also opposites: Rock charges no licence fee but asks a suggested $4.45 per average weekend attendee per year and needs hosting from $419 a month plus technical staff, while Aplos is a flat published monthly figure that a treasurer can put in a budget line and forget.
Against the wider church-software field, Aplos's distinctive position is that accounting is the product rather than a module. Church management platforms and giving platforms both touch money, and several handle donations and giving statements well - Aplos itself includes donation tracking, online giving forms, text-to-give and a donor portal, so there is real overlap at that end. The overlap stops at the ledger. If what your church actually needs is better donor communication or online giving, a giving-first product will probably serve you better and cheaper. If what it needs is books that survive an audit and a board that can see fund balances, this is the category, and Aplos makes the clearest published case in it.
The bottom line
Aplos is the most convincing published case for true fund accounting aimed at churches, and its origin story - a CPA and executive pastor who could not find affordable fund accounting for his own church in 2009 - shows in the design. Restricted and unrestricted money separate automatically, Balance Sheet by Fund and Income Statement by Fund arrive on the $79 Lite tier rather than being held back, and Form 990 mapping and 1099 management turn the annual compliance cycle into a report. Our 4.1 is an editorial assessment of the published material rather than a user score: this is cloud web software with no mobile app published on the pages reviewed, so there is no app store rating to cite. What holds it back is not the accounting but the packaging. Lite gives you two users, no integrations and no permission controls; Core at $129 is the tier most churches will actually need; the price of a fourth user is not published anywhere reachable; payroll lives at Gusto; and the terms you would want to read before handing over your ledger return a 404. The Velora consolidation under ASG and Alpine Investors is worth weighing in both directions - more investment and a plausible donor-to-ledger roadmap on one side, pricing power at renewal on the other. Use the 15-day trial, and use it to get three answers in writing: the additional-user price, the renewal and price-change terms, and how you get your data out if you leave.
Alternatives to Aplos
Rock RMSThe operational counterpart rather than a replacement. No licence fees at all, a suggested $4.45 per weekend attendee a year, and hosting from $419/month - but it needs real technical staff and is not a nonprofit general ledger.
Tithe.lyWorth comparing if the actual problem is money coming in rather than the books. Giving-first, with church management alongside, and a much lower barrier for a small church without a treasurer.
ChMeetingsA conventional hosted church management system for churches that need people, groups and events sorted first. Pair it with dedicated accounting rather than expecting it to replace a fund ledger.
Planning CenterThe modular commercial ChMS most churches evaluate alongside a finance tool. Strong on operations, and the usual reason churches end up buying accounting software separately.Frequently asked questions
How much does Aplos cost?
Lite is $79 a month with 2 users, Core $129 with 2 users, and Advanced $229 with 3 users. Above those there is a Custom tier with "Tailored Pricing" for organisations with $1 million or more in annual revenue. A 15-day free trial requires no credit card. At the time of review a promotion offered 50% off for three months with code SUMMER26 - $39.50 for Lite and $64.50 for Core - valid through 31 July and not applicable to Advanced or Custom. Only monthly pricing is displayed; no annual billing option or discount is published.
What is fund accounting and why does a church need it?
A church holds money that is legally spoken for. A gift given towards a building project cannot lawfully be spent on salaries, so restricted funds have to be tracked separately from the general fund. Fund accounting treats each fund as its own self-balancing set of books, so you can produce a balance sheet showing what each fund actually holds. General-purpose bookkeeping software only offers classes or tags - reporting labels on a single entity-wide ledger - which will filter an income statement but will not give you a balance sheet per fund. Aplos separates restricted from unrestricted automatically and includes Balance Sheet by Fund and Income Statement by Fund on its cheapest tier.
What is missing from the $79 Lite tier?
Two things that matter. Third-party integrations start at Core ($129), so a Lite church cannot connect outside tools at all. User Roles & Permissions also start at Core, so both of Lite's two users see everything with no way to restrict access - worth thinking about if one of them is a volunteer. Lite also lacks accounts payable and receivable, basic budgeting, recurring transactions and period close. It does include Balance Sheet by Fund, Income Statement by Fund, bank reconciliation, custom reports, the Board Portal, 1099 management and unlimited customer support.
How many users do you get, and what do extra users cost?
Lite and Core include 2 users; Advanced includes 3; the Custom tier may include additional users. The cost of users beyond those included is not published on the pricing page, and the help-centre article on adding and managing users could not be retrieved for this review. So a church with a pastor, treasurer, bookkeeper and administrator cannot be costed from published information - ask the vendor for the figure in writing during the trial.
Does Aplos handle payroll?
Not itself. Payroll is delivered through a partnership with Gusto and billed separately at a price Aplos does not publish. Prepaid expense cards come through Pex and expense management through RAMP on the same basis. Other named integrations and partners include Stripe Payments, Fifth Third Bank, DonorElf, Church Community Builder and Bloomerang, and Aplos publishes a public API - but remember that third-party integrations are gated to Core and above.
Is there a mobile app, and where does the rating come from?
Aplos is cloud web software used at app.aplos.com, and no mobile app is mentioned on the homepage, pricing page or church accounting page reviewed. Because there is no consumer app to rate, our 4.1 is an editorial assessment based on the vendor's published material rather than an aggregate user score, and no app store rating is cited anywhere in this review.
Does the Velora and private-equity ownership matter?
It is a legitimate consideration in both directions. Aplos raised a $4M Series A in 2016, acquired Keela in 2023 and Raisely in 2024, and in 2025 the three became Velora, which sits under ASG, backed by Alpine Investors. Consolidation can mean more investment and genuinely integrated donor-to-ledger workflows; roll-ups also build pricing power that tends to appear at renewal. Since only monthly pricing is published and no reachable terms page exists - aplos.com/legal-stuff returns 404 - there is no published price lock to point to. Get renewal terms, price-change terms and data-export rights confirmed in writing before you migrate.
What support is included?
"Unlimited Customer Support" is listed from Lite upwards, with no published SLA or response-time commitment. The published hours are Monday to Friday, 7am to 3pm Pacific on 888-274-1316, which is 10am to 6pm Eastern - an eight-hour weekday window with nothing at weekends. Paid bookkeeping and implementation services are offered separately at unpublished rates.
Sources & further reading
- faith.tools listing for background on the company and its history ↗
- Aplos - homepage (what it does, feature set, 15-day trial, Velora suite, Gusto/Pex/Stripe partners, 65,000+ users, support hours) ↗
- Aplos - pricing (Lite/Core/Advanced/Custom prices, included users, feature gating, SUMMER26 promotion, trial terms, add-ons) ↗
- Aplos - About (founded 2009, $4M Series A in 2016, Keela 2023, Raisely 2024, Velora 2025) ↗
- Aplos for churches - church feature set, donations included, payroll via Gusto, named integrations ↗
- Aplos legal terms - checked and returned 404; no reachable published terms, refund or cancellation policy ↗
- Aplos help centre - adding and managing users; blocked by bot protection, so additional-user cost could not be verified ↗
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