A handful of settings shape everything else in GoodBooks: what prints on receipts, when your year starts, whether you keep cash or accrual books, and the dates before which nothing can be posted. They live on two pages, Settings → Organization and Settings → Accounting & Controls, and most are set once during onboarding and rarely touched again.
Settings → Organization
Organization Identity
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Organization Name | Appears everywhere: page headers, receipts, invoices, emails. |
| Reply-To Email | Where replies to receipts and other outbound email land. |
| Tax ID / EIN | Printed on every gift receipt and giving statement. |
| Public Charity Status | Verify with CharityAPI confirms your 501(c)(3) standing against the IRS list; verified organizations get the "tax-deductible to the full extent of the law" language on receipts. |
| Mission Focus | The category you picked at signup; helps us tailor what we build. |
Contact & Location: phone, website, mailing address, year founded. The address is what donors see on receipts and what the giving page uses.
Accounting Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Accounting Basis | Cash or Accrual. Cash books record income when money arrives and expenses when paid. Accrual books record an invoice as receivable when it's sent and a bill when it's owed. Most small nonprofits run cash; choose accrual if your board or funders expect it. Invoicing behaves differently under each (see Creating and Sending Invoices). |
| Use Account Numbers | Shows account numbers alongside names in your chart of accounts and reports. |
| Fiscal Year End | The month your year closes. Everything date-related follows it: the Balance Sheet's current-year surplus, YTD and quarter presets on reports, budgets, and the default start date of range reports. Set this before you build a budget; it can't be changed by you afterward, only by support. |
| Timezone | Used for "today" on entry forms and for timestamps in the audit trail. |
Account Owner is the one user who can change the owner, and the person the second-administrator policy counts around. Account Info shows your subdomain and plan; changing either goes through support or the Billing page.
Settings → Accounting & Controls
The Accounting side of this page holds the defaults that entry forms pre-fill:
- Cash/Bank Account for Donations and Revenue Account for Donations: where a plain donation posts when it settles. The page shows the resulting journal entry for a $100 gift so you can see it's right.
- Default Fund and Default Bank Account: pre-selected on new journal lines, checks, and deposits.
- Accounting Start Date: the day your books in GoodBooks begin. Entry forms won't accept a date before it, and reports default to it.
- Book Close Date: the newest date that's locked. Set it after the board approves a period (or after a reconciliation) and nothing can be posted, edited, or voided on or before it. Move it forward month by month and your history stays exactly as reported.
The Internal Controls side of the same page is covered in Internal Controls: The Guardrails on Your Books.
Good to know
- There is no year-end close procedure. Prior-year surplus rolls into net assets automatically at your fiscal year start; see A Guide to Your Financial Reports.
- Changing the accounting basis after you've started invoicing is a conversation with your accountant first; it changes how open invoices are represented.
- Everything on these pages requires the Settings permission, which only System Administrators have.
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