BoardLight
For Boys & Girls Clubs and nonprofits running on QuickBooks
Your board shouldn't need an accounting degree.
BoardLight turns QuickBooks into a live financial portal your board, your directors, your program leads, and your bookkeeper can all actually use. No exports. No rekeying. No forty-page PDF that lands three weeks late.
Running in production today at Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Santiam, syncing a live QuickBooks Desktop file every hour.
The problem
Every small nonprofit runs finance the same painful way.
Your books are fine. Getting anything out of them is the problem.
The board packet is always late
Close the month, export to Excel, reformat by hand, assemble a PDF, email it around. By the time the board sees a number it's four to six weeks stale — and they're being asked to approve decisions against it.
Your bookkeeper is a copy machine
Invoices arrive by email. They get printed, coded by hand, keyed into QuickBooks, then filed in a drawer nobody opens. It's hours a week of pure retyping, and the approval trail lives in somebody's inbox.
Nobody can answer "why"
The P&L says $48,000 in program supplies. Which program? Which invoices? Was that budgeted? Answering takes a phone call to the bookkeeper and a twenty-minute dig — so nobody asks.
How it works
Live in about two weeks. Nothing changes about how you keep the books.
BoardLight sits alongside QuickBooks Desktop and reads from it. Your bookkeeper keeps working exactly the way they work today.
Install the Web Connector
A fifteen-minute setup on the machine that already runs QuickBooks. It's Intuit's own Web Connector — the same tool your payroll or donor software probably already uses. It syncs on a schedule and needs no open ports.
We map your chart of accounts
This is the part that actually matters, and we do it with you rather than handing you a wizard. Accounts, classes, programs, restricted funds, and your budget file get mapped once so every report downstream is right.
Invite your board
Each member gets their own sign-in — no shared passwords, no forwarded PDFs. They see a dashboard built for someone who reads financials four times a year, and they can click any number to see what's behind it.
BoardLight never writes to your QuickBooks file.
Not "we're careful." Structurally cannot. The connector issues read-only report and query requests and nothing else — there is no code path in BoardLight that creates, edits, or deletes a transaction in QuickBooks. Your bookkeeper stays the only person who touches the books, and your file is exactly as safe as it was yesterday.
The product
Six pieces. One portal.
Everything reads from the same synced data, so the board, the director, the program managers, and the bookkeeper are never looking at different numbers.
Nobody has to open QuickBooks to answer a question. Profit & loss, budget versus actual, year-over-year, aging, department detail — all of it live in the browser, on any device, for anyone you've given access to. No QuickBooks license, no remote desktop session, no waiting for the one person who has the file open. Your bookkeeper stops being a report-running service.
The part your board actually touches. Individual logins, a dashboard designed for volunteers rather than accountants, and monthly report packs that build themselves. Any figure on screen can be clicked down to the transactions underneath it — so "why is supplies up?" gets answered in the meeting instead of in next month's follow-up email.
A real BI tool for the people running programs. Every department, site, and program gets its own dashboard showing its budget, its spend, and its trend — so the athletics director can see the athletics numbers without a finance meeting and without seeing payroll. Slice by class, by site, by period, and drill from any total straight to the transactions.
One place in and one place out for everything the accounting office handles. Bills and invoices arrive by email or upload, get read and coded automatically using the vendor's usual coding, then route for approval with the discussion attached to the invoice instead of buried in somebody's inbox. Payables and receivables live side by side, so you can see what's owed and what's coming in on one screen.
Every invoice has a status, and everyone can see it. Received, submitted, approved, paid — with who did what and when. "Did that vendor ever get paid?" stops being a phone call and a folder dig. The full register is searchable, so any historical invoice is thirty seconds away instead of in a banker's box.
The plumbing underneath all of it. Pulls from your accounting system on a schedule, tracks every sync, and tells you plainly when something didn't come through — instead of failing quietly and letting a stale number reach the board.
Connections
Built to connect to whatever you already run.
BoardLight keeps your data in its own store rather than querying your accounting system live. That's what makes reports fast, and it's what makes adding a second data source a matter of mapping rather than rebuilding.
QuickBooks Desktop
Pro, Premier, Nonprofit, and Enterprise, through Intuit's Web Connector. Read-only, scheduled, no open ports. This is what's running in production today.
QuickBooks Online
The same portal, reading from QBO through Intuit's API instead of the Web Connector. Everything above it — board portal, departments, payables, tracking — is already source-agnostic, so this is a connector, not a rewrite. Join early access and we'll tell you the moment it's ready.
Your other systems
Donor and fundraising platforms, payroll, membership and attendance, grant tracking, bank feeds. An open API so the dashboard your board looks at can show the whole picture instead of only what the general ledger knows. Tell us what you run — the integrations we build first will be the ones customers ask for most.
Pricing
Priced on your operating budget, not per seat.
Charging per user would mean charging you to add a board member. Every plan includes unlimited board members and staff logins.
- BoardLight Sync
- BoardLight Reports
- BoardLight Board
- Unlimited board & staff logins
- Monthly board report packs
- Full transaction drilldown
- Email support
- Everything in Club, plus:
- BoardLight Departments
- BoardLight Payables
- BoardLight Tracking
- Multi-site and program dashboards
- A/P approval workflow
- Priority support
- Everything in Alliance, plus:
- Rolled-up multi-club reporting
- Per-club and consolidated views
- Onboarding for every affiliate
- Dedicated implementation lead
- Annual agreement
Implementation is $1,999, one time. That covers mapping your chart of accounts, classes, departments and budget, installing the connector, configuring approval routing, and training your staff and board. It's real work and we'd rather charge for it than do it badly. Waived on annual Network agreements.
Nonprofit-only. BoardLight is sold to 501(c)(3) organizations. If you're a club under $500K in annual budget, ask us — we have room to work with you.
Questions
Things clubs ask us first
Does this replace QuickBooks?
No, and it shouldn't. QuickBooks stays your book of record and your bookkeeper keeps working in it exactly as they do now. BoardLight is the layer on top that makes what's already in there readable by people who aren't accountants.
Can BoardLight change anything in our QuickBooks file?
No. The connector only issues read-only report and query requests. There is no function in BoardLight that adds, edits, or deletes a QuickBooks transaction. Invoice approvals happen in BoardLight and produce a clean, coded, approved queue — your bookkeeper still makes the entry.
We're on QuickBooks Online. Can we use this?
Not yet — QuickBooks Online support is in active development, and we'd rather tell you that plainly than sell you something that isn't ready. What runs in production today is the QuickBooks Desktop connector, which is where most clubs still are and where almost nobody has built good tooling.
The important part: everything above the connector — reporting, board portal, department dashboards, payables, invoice tracking — doesn't care where the data came from. Adding QBO is a connector, not a rewrite. Join early access and we'll tell you the moment it's ready.
Can you connect to our donor database, payroll, or other systems?
Not today, and we won't pretend otherwise. It's the direction we're building — BoardLight stores your data rather than querying your accounting system live, which is exactly what makes a second source a mapping exercise instead of a rebuild.
What we'd genuinely like is to hear what you run. The integrations we build first will be the ones clubs actually ask for, so tell us in the demo form and it counts as a vote.
Do we need IT staff to run this?
No. What you need is one Windows machine that already has QuickBooks on it and stays powered on — usually the bookkeeper's desktop or your existing server. We handle the install on a screen-share. There's nothing to open on your firewall.
How is our financial data protected?
Every organization's data is isolated, encrypted in transit and at rest, and reachable only through individual named sign-ins — there are no shared passwords or shared links anywhere in the product. Access is role-based, so a board member sees board reporting and only your finance staff see invoice-level detail. Removing a departing board member takes one click.
How long does onboarding actually take?
Two to three weeks end to end, and most of that is scheduling rather than work. The connector install is an afternoon. Mapping your chart of accounts and classes is one or two working sessions. Board training is a thirty-minute call.
What if we leave?
You export everything and turn off the connector. Your QuickBooks file is untouched and always has been — that's the upside of read-only. There's no lock-in because there's nothing of yours that only we hold. Monthly plans cancel any time.
Are you affiliated with Boys & Girls Clubs of America?
No. BoardLight is an independent company. We were built inside a Boys & Girls Club because that's where the problem was, and clubs remain who we understand best — but we're not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for BGCA or any national organization.
Request a demo
See it running on real books.
A thirty-minute call. We'll show you a live club's dashboard, walk your actual chart of accounts, and tell you honestly whether BoardLight is a fit. If your books are in a shape we can't help with yet, we'll say so.
No slide deck, no sales engineer, no sequence of follow-up emails.
Not ready yet? Join early access.
We're onboarding a small number of clubs at a time so each one gets done properly. Leave your email and we'll reach out when there's a slot — plus we'll let you know when QuickBooks Online support ships.
One email when there's news. Nothing else, ever.