The spreadsheet trap
Fund balances get tracked in a parallel workbook because the accounting system cannot hold them. The workbook becomes the real books, one person understands it, and the audit finds out.
Modular ERP · Fund accounting first
Accounting software that actually understands restricted funds.
Consistent at every scale.
Sofic is a modular ERP for nonprofits and the organizations that operate like them. It starts with real multi-basis fund accounting — not a commercial ledger with a “nonprofit” label bolted on — and grows one module at a time, at the pace you can afford.
AI-native, not bolted on
Most vendors in this market are wiring a chatbot onto a ledger written a decade before language models existed. Sofic's schema, permission model and audit trail were designed with an AI layer as a first-class citizen from day one — not retrofitted after the fact.
- Every table structured to be machine-legible, not just human-readable
- The assistant runs under the same permission model as your staff
- Every proposal arrives explainable in plain language — never a black box
The problem
Nonprofits are stuck between a spreadsheet and a seven-figure suite.
There is almost nothing in the middle. Finance teams at small and mid-sized organizations end up choosing between tools that cannot do the job and tools that cost more than the program they are meant to track.
The general-purpose workaround
QuickBooks and its peers are made for commercial entities. Classes and tags get bent into standing in for funds and grants — a convention, not a control. Nothing stops a bad posting.
The legacy incumbents
Blackbaud, MIP and similar suites do understand fund accounting, and price accordingly. Long implementations, module bundles you did not ask for, and a per-seat cost that punishes growth.
The gap is not features. It is a correct ledger at a price a nonprofit can actually pay.
The product
One ledger. Modules you buy independently.
Every module writes to the same double-entry core, so there is no month-end reconciliation between your own systems. But each one is purchased on its own — start with fund accounting, add the next piece when the organization needs it.
Shipped
Fund Accounting
The core. Segmented chart of accounts, per-fund measurement basis, multi-basis double-entry journal, control accounts, fiscal calendar, period and year-end close, and financial statements.
Shipped
Payables & Receivables
Vendor and customer masters, A/P and A/R subledgers, budgets with approval-against-budget, credit memos, aging, and encrypted vendor bank details.
Shipped
Fixed Assets
Capitalization that keeps pending capital expenditure on the balance sheet where it belongs, accrual-only depreciation with salvage limits, and disposal handling.
In development
Vendor Portal
Vendors onboard themselves through single-use invites. Bank-detail changes arrive as proposals requiring staff approval — so a phishing email can never equal a redirected payment.
Planned
Point of Sale
Thrift shops, gift shops, event and ticket sales — earned revenue posted straight to the correct fund at the register, instead of arriving as a monthly summary journal entry.
Planned
Inventory
Donated and purchased goods tracked together, including in-kind valuation, program consumption, and the cost of goods behind every point-of-sale transaction.
In development
Intelligent Workflows
An LLM layer across every module — automating the repetitive work, watching the books for what needs attention, and answering questions in plain language. It proposes; a person approves.
What the assistant is for
Small finance teams do not need a chatbot. They need the hours back. The intelligent layer targets three specific jobs, and stays inside the same permission and audit model as every other part of Sofic.
Automation
Coding invoices to the right fund and account, matching receipts to bills, drafting recurring entries, preparing the close checklist — proposed as documents a human reviews, never posted silently.
Management
Watching for the things that surface too late today: a grant burning faster than its period, a fund drifting toward a negative balance, an approval sitting unactioned, a budget line about to be breached.
Advice
Plain-language answers about your own books — what changed this month and why, how a restricted grant should be treated, what the statements will look like if you make a call one way or the other.
The rule it is built under: the assistant drafts, explains and warns. It does not approve, post or release money. Every suggestion arrives as a proposal with its reasoning attached, through the same segregation-of-duties controls a person is held to — and it is not a substitute for your accountant or auditor.
FASB·GASB
Both frameworks first-class, not an export option
Multi-basis
Cash, modified accrual and full accrual stored side by side
Browser UI
One server install — Windows, macOS and Linux staff, no per-desk software
Approximation is for guesswork. Sofic is for certainty.
Coming soon · AI knowledge base
Every answer, signed and sourced.
Sofic Verified is the knowledge base behind Sofic's AI — written and published by the same two people who built the ledger, not scraped from a forum or summarized from a stale PDF. Every answer it gives carries a citation and a cryptographic signature, so you can check it yourself instead of taking our word for it.
Written by practitioners
Every entry is authored by a CPA with 27 years in nonprofit accounting and reviewed against the FASB and GASB Codification — not generated by a model guessing at an answer.
Two people, enforced by the database
Christina writes it, John publishes it, and the database itself refuses to let one person do both — the same segregation-of-duties discipline the ledger enforces on your own postings.
Signed, not just stated
Every published entry is cryptographically signed the moment it goes live. Every citation your team receives carries that signature, checkable against a published key — proof, not a promise.
Illustrative example — not a live query
“How should a multi-year restricted grant be recognized?”
Recognize at the award's fair value once the grantor's conditions are substantially met, not on receipt of cash — a time- or purpose-restricted grant stays in restricted net assets until released, even if the funds already arrived.
Sofic Verified is a separate, optional subscription — available alongside any Sofic deployment, self-hosted, your cloud, or hosted by us. It does not change how the core ledger itself is licensed.
Deployment & licensing
Your books, your infrastructure, your terms.
Most vendors in this market tell a nonprofit how it will buy and where the software will run. Sofic does not. Three ways to run it, two ways to license it — pick the combination that fits your board, your IT reality and your budget.
Run it yourself
On your own hardware
A server in your building or your colo, administered by your own IT. Nothing leaves your premises — which for some organizations is a grant condition or a board policy, not a preference.
Run it in your cloud
An instance you own
We help you stand up Sofic in a cloud account that belongs to you. You hold the keys, the backups and the bill; we make sure it is built and secured properly.
Let us run it
Hosted by Sofic
No infrastructure to own at all. We host, patch, back up and keep it available; your staff simply log in. The usual SaaS arrangement, for teams with no IT to spare.
Subscription or perpetual — your call.
A subscription suits organizations that would rather hold a predictable annual line item. It does not suit everyone, so we also sell perpetual licenses for organizations that would rather own the software outright than rent it. Nobody is pushed into a recurring contract to keep access to books they have already paid for.
The choice is not a trap either way. It is the same product in all three deployments, so an organization that starts hosted and later wants it in-house is not facing a re-implementation.
- Self-hosted, your cloud, or hosted by us
- Subscription or perpetual license
- Your data stays yours in every option
- Move between deployments without starting over
Why us
An accountant and an engineer, 56 years in the problem between them.
Most accounting products are built by software people who interviewed an accountant. Sofic is built by two practitioners who have spent their careers on opposite halves of the same problem — and neither half is guesswork.
Christina Paloski
Co-owner · CEO & CFO
A Certified Public Accountant licensed in New York, Virginia, Washington D.C. and Georgia, with 27 years in the profession — including 25 years accounting for nonprofits and over a decade as a CFO.
She has closed these books, under these constraints, on these tools. Every requirement in Sofic — restricted funds, grant awards and indirect cost recovery, the close itself — came from that work rather than from a competitor's feature list. She is building and testing the system herself, not handing specifications to someone else.
John Hess
Co-owner · CTO & CISO
A systems and security engineer, in systems administration since 1997 — 29 years across Linux, Unix and Windows, enterprise infrastructure and operations, AWS, and software development, with the security of those systems his responsibility throughout.
He has run these systems, under these constraints, at this scale. Sofic's controls — an append-only audit log enforced at the database level, encrypted vendor banking — came from that work rather than from a compliance checklist. His current work integrating AI into existing enterprise infrastructure is the discipline behind the intelligent workflow layer.
That pairing shows up as decisions a software team on its own would not make. Journal entries are refused against control accounts, because the subledger has to be the truth. Bad debt posts to expense instead of quietly reversing revenue, because burying a collection problem in the top line is how boards get surprised. Closing entries are reversed rather than deleted, because the prior year has to stay provable.
None of that is exotic. It is what a practitioner insists on and a feature list never mentions.
Why Sofic
A sofic group is a mathematical structure where infinitely complex systems can be modeled with perfect local accuracy — every finite piece stays consistent with the whole, no matter how large it grows. That's the property fund accounting demands as an organization scales: every fund, every grant, every module has to reconcile to the same truth, without drift. It's also where the name comes from.
Status
Built and running. In beta, with real books.
Sofic is working software, deployed and exercised daily — not a prototype and not a slide deck. Here is exactly where it stands.
18
modules live and posting to real ledgers
50
working screens in the running application
1,499
automated tests green on every build
4
modules specified and not yet started
Deployable today. Multi-tenant architecture, real authentication and role-based authorization, encrypted vendor banking data, and an append-only administrative audit log enforced at the database level.
Depth where nonprofits actually live. Grant awards with life-to-date position, indirect cost recovery and its allocation base, budget-versus-actual, purchase orders and encumbrances, multi-step expenditure approval routing, recurring and memorized entries, ACH remittance advices, period close, and 1099-NEC and Form 945 filing.
Correctness is the product. Every build runs the full suite and a strict type check across the application. The test count has roughly doubled in the last two weeks, and it grows because each defect found in a real ledger becomes a test before it becomes a fix.
Honest about what is next. The vendor portal is in development and the intelligent workflow layer has moved from specification into build. Point of sale and inventory are specified and not yet started. We would rather show you a short list that is true than a long one that is not.
Contact
Come look at the working system.
The most useful next step is a live walkthrough — real books, real postings, real close. Thirty minutes, no deck.
christina@sofic.ai
·
CEO & CFO
john@sofic.ai
·
CTO