Society Books
Free accounting for Canadian non-profit societies.
Don't want to host it yourself? Society Books also runs as an online service at societybooks.ca — just use it there. This page is about the other way: running your society's own copy, from the repo.
Society Books began as the books for our own small society. It is double-entry accounting made for volunteers, not accountants — and it is the same books your society runs for itself.
What you can do
Where the money is. You always know where the money is. Accounts and funds each stand on their own, and every balance is built from the entries underneath it — pick any figure and you can trace it back to the day it happened.
Grant dollars. Every grant dollar accounted for, the moment a funder asks. Money that comes with conditions is kept in its own fund, apart from the society's everyday money, and the record of what it paid for is always at hand.
Prepared for your decision. Your AI assistant prepares everything. You just decide. Claims and payments arrive set out for approval — who is being paid, how much, what for — and wait for a person's yes.
Taxes and year end. Easy tax form preparation and year end filing. The figures for your returns build up in the books all year, so year end is a check, not a rebuild.
Your accountant. Everything your accountant needs in one click. The whole year leaves as one sealed pack, opened only with the passphrase you set when you make it.
People and assistants
Every director can view the books; guided by their personal AI assistant. Each person can have their own assistant in the app, set up under their own login.
An assistant can file a claim or draft an entry, but nothing it prepares is final. Every proposal waits for a person to approve it, change it or turn it down with a reason.
Nobody approves their own payment. A payment to the person asking always waits for someone else, and the history shows who prepared it and who approved it.
Why Society Books exists
We built Society Books for a simple reason: our own society needed books a volunteer could run and a board could trust, and nothing we found fit. So we built the books we needed.
It is free — not a trial, not a tier — because societies run on volunteers and small budgets. It needs no account with a big platform.
Your books
Every person signs in to your copy with their own login. Sign-in is passkey-first: a passkey is the normal way in, and a password is there if a person wants one.
The books belong to the society. Run Society Books on the society's own computer, or on Cloudflare — the same books either way, in one data file you can back up and keep.
And the books always balance. An entry that does not balance cannot be posted, and a posted entry cannot be quietly changed: a correction is a new entry, dated and explained.
Get Society Books
Run your own copy of Society Books, free. The books live on the society's own computer, or in the society's own Cloudflare account. No company holds your data, and there is no account elsewhere to lose.
Society Books is soon to be open source. Anyone will be able to read exactly how it works, and the public repository will carry the installation details for both ways of running it.
Repo coming soon.