Hr software for nonprofits: best hr software for nonprofits and free hr software for nonprofits, judged on what a charity actually needs

Testing against charity specifics

1. Ask how a volunteer is represented. Not as an employee with a zero salary, ideally. Ask whether the product has a non employee record type with its own permissions and its own retention, because volunteers generate real data protection obligations and no payroll.
2. Ask how cost is attributed. Staff time split across restricted funds is the reporting that grant makers ask for. Find out whether the product can hold an allocation per person per period, or whether that lives in finance.
3. Ask about the discount before the demonstration. Many vendors offer charity pricing and few advertise it clearly. Ask early, because it changes which products are worth evaluating.

Best hr software for nonprofits is usually a general product

Sector branded HR products exist and are frequently a general product with a discount and a case study. That is not a criticism, but it means the evaluation should be the same as anybody else's, with two extra columns for volunteers and fund attribution.

Where a genuinely sector built product exists it usually shows in the reporting rather than the record: reports shaped for trustees and funders rather than for a finance director. That is worth paying for if those reports currently take days.

Free hr software for nonprofits and its limits

Free tiers and charity licences are common and often sufficient for a small organisation with a handful of paid staff. The limits that bite are document expiry handling and anything to do with safeguarding checks, both of which carry obligations and both of which sit in paid tiers.

Where volunteers outnumber staff, the headcount caps on free tiers become the constraint. Ask whether a non employee record counts toward the cap, because the answer varies and the difference is large.

Governance questions a board will ask

Who can see salary, how long records are kept after somebody leaves, and whether the organisation could produce everything it holds about a person if asked. All three are answerable in an afternoon with a product configured properly and not at all with a shared drive.

Set the retention rule at configuration and write it down in a line that a trustee can read. It is the single most useful governance artefact an HR system produces and almost nobody creates it deliberately.

Common questions

Do volunteers need to be in the HR system?

They need to be recorded somewhere with permissions and a retention rule, and the HR system is usually the least bad place. What they must not be is employees with a zero salary, which distorts every headcount report.

Is charity pricing usually significant?

It varies from a modest discount to a free tier for small organisations. It is always worth asking before shortlisting, because it can move a product from unaffordable to obvious.

How should safeguarding checks be held?

As typed document records with an issue date, an expiry and restricted access, never as a note. The evidence and its date are the point, and a reminder before expiry is the reason to keep them in a system.

What about staff paid from more than one grant?

Ask whether the product can hold a percentage allocation with effective dates. If it cannot, that reporting stays in finance, which is workable provided somebody owns keeping the two in step.

Coverage by country

• Employer of record vendors covering Singapore
• Employer of record vendors covering Mexico
• Employer of record vendors covering Spain
• Employer of record vendors covering Colombia
• Employer of record vendors covering United Kingdom
• Employer of record vendors covering France
• Employer of record vendors covering Hungary
• Employer of record vendors covering New Zealand