Back to Blog

The Tech Stack We Use to Run CTSO Accounting

A lot of accounting firms keep their tools vague. We don't. Here's exactly what we use to manage CTSO accounting — and why we chose each one.

QuickBooks Online

QBO is the foundation. Which plan a client lands on depends on the size and complexity of their organization — and we take that seriously, because there's no reason to pay for features you don't need.

For smaller, lower-activity chapters with straightforward financials and a single conference or none at all, Simple Start or Essentials is often enough. The books are clean, the reporting is adequate, and the cost is appropriate for the scale of the organization.

For state CTSOs running multiple conferences, collecting dues from hundreds of local chapters, and presenting monthly financials to an active board, Plus is where you need to be. The key feature is class tracking — the ability to tag every income and expense transaction by event or program, so you can pull a P&L for FLC, State Conference, and ILC independently and see exactly what each one made or cost. At that level of operational complexity, class tracking isn't optional.

Advanced, despite the marketing, is more than most CTSOs need. The additional features don't map cleanly to how these organizations operate, and the price difference isn't justified by what you actually get. We haven't found a CTSO that needed it.

Melio — Bill Pay and AP

For paying vendors and managing accounts payable, we use Melio. For CTSOs specifically, it solves a governance problem that most organizations are handling informally — or not handling at all.

Most CTSO bylaws or financial policies require dual authorization on disbursements, meaning two people need to sign off before money goes out. Melio's custom approval workflows make that requirement enforceable in software rather than something that depends on whether the right people happen to be in the room. Every payment gets routed through the approval chain before it's processed, which is a meaningful internal control for an organization with rotating leadership and heavy volunteer involvement.

On the cost side, ACH payments are free and physical checks run $1.50 each. Plans are $15 per month for standard use or $33 per month if you need custom approval workflows, which most CTSOs with a dual-signature requirement will. For the level of financial control it provides, that's a very reasonable price.

Want to learn more about Melio? You can explore their platform and features here.

Expensify — Expense Management and Receipt Capture

Anyone at your organization who carries a credit card gets set up in Expensify. At $10 per user per month, it handles receipt capture, expense categorization, and approval workflows in a way that eliminates the end-of-month receipt chase that plagues most small nonprofits.

Instead of trying to reconstruct what a charge was from a bank statement description three weeks after the fact, expenses are logged at the time of purchase with a receipt photo attached. When a cardholder submits an expense, it moves through an approval flow before it hits the books — which adds a layer of oversight that matters in an organization where financial controls can be inconsistent from one leadership cycle to the next.

What About Bill.com?

Bill.com is the most widely recognized AP platform in the accounting space, and it's worth addressing directly. We don't use it for CTSO clients primarily because the bill pay functionality is more expensive than Melio for comparable features. Bill.com also tends to push users toward their own credit card product as part of the ecosystem — and for a CTSO that may already have a preferred card through their national organization or a state agency, that's unnecessary friction.

Melio covers the same core functionality — ACH, check payments, custom approval workflows — at a lower cost and without the product ecosystem pressure. For the way CTSOs actually operate, it's the better fit.

You Don't Have to Build This From Scratch

One of the practical advantages of working with Blackpoint is that this infrastructure is already in place. When you become a client, you're not evaluating tools, configuring integrations, or figuring out how to connect everything. We bring the stack with us — your books in QBO, your bill pay running through Melio with dual approval enforced, your cardholders capturing receipts in Expensify, all of it connected and documented from day one.

If you want to see how it works in practice, book a free consultation. We'll walk you through our process and show you exactly what your accounting would look like with Blackpoint managing it.