Providing Lesotho's Children with Keys to the World

This is the story of our efforts to end the vicious cycle of poverty, disease, inadequate education, and early death
in a remote rural community in Lesotho, Africa, by providing quality education and life skills
to the young children there. Join us on our journey ...

Showing posts with label accounting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label accounting. Show all posts

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Discounted Accounting Software and Grant-writing Service via TechSoup.org

We purchased the accounting software, QuickBooks Premier Edition 2010, which includes the Nonprofit Edition, via TechSoup.org. It was donated by Intuit, the company that created QuickBooks, so that we were able to get it for just $45. The going rate on the open market is around $315. Thank you, Intuit! Now Andrew gets to learn how to use it.

We were also able to buy a one-year membership to GrantStation.com, normally $599, for just $99. GrantStation is a funding research and grant-writing assistance service. I'm hoping I can use it to find funding for this year if the grant applications we have out now don't get funded, and for next year so we can buy lots more computers, work on the curriculum integration for other grade levels, and do interface translation into Sesotho, among other things. Thanks, GrantStation, for providing this service at a price we can actually afford!

- Janissa

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Registration with other websites -- GuideStar.org, TechSoup.org

Last week, I registered Laptops to Lesotho with GuideStar.org and TechSoup.org. Both required verification that L2L was a 501(c)(3) organization, so I had to send them our IRS Letter of Determination. I got a confirmation back but it will take a few days for Laptops to Lesotho to show up on their sites.

GuideStar.org is a verified list of official tax-exempt nonprofit organizations. Other websites that accept donations for causes, like Facebook Causes and JustGive.org, require that our organization be on the GuideStar list before they will accept us on their websites. As soon as we get into the GuideStar database, we can start accepting donations via Facebook, JustGive, and others.

TechSoup.org gets tech hardware and software donated by a variety of companies and then distributes them to nonprofits for a small processing fee. Now that Andrew is Treasurer, he will be looking at getting accounting software from TechSoup. We can also get other hardware from them, like a network server and possibly internet access hardware.

- Janissa