Meet Velora Budgeting: A better way to build your nonprofit’s financial plan

Your budget should help your organization plan what comes next.

But for many nonprofits, building a budget still means exporting actuals, reconstructing financial history in a spreadsheet, adjusting figures across dozens of cells, and moving the finished plan back into the accounting system. When circumstances change, the cycle begins again.

After talking to nonprofit finance professionals, we know there’s a better way to build and manage a budget.

With that, we’re introducing Velora Budgeting, a brand-new budgeting and financial planning experience built to help nonprofit teams create, publish, and maintain their organization’s budget with less manual work.

Today, this new budgeting tool is only available to eligible Aplos customers on a Core subscription plan, as we continue to build and evolve functionality. Eventually, Velora Budgeting will be available as a standalone product.

Velora Budgeting brings the planning process closer to the financial information already in Aplos. Instead of treating your budget like a once-a-year spreadsheet, you can build a clearer plan of record, keep changes traceable, and make the budget more useful throughout the year.

Why we built Velora Budgeting

Aplos (Velora Fund Accounting) helps nonprofit finance teams understand what has already happened. It holds the financial activity your organization relies on to report accurately and make responsible decisions.

Budgeting asks a different question: What should happen next?

Too often, the information needed to answer that question is split across systems and files. Actuals live in the accounting system. Assumptions live in spreadsheets. The approved budget may be stored in one file, while the latest outlook lives in another.

That creates avoidable work and makes it harder to answer basic questions:

• Which version is the plan we approved?
• What changed after we published it?
• Are we still tracking toward our expectations?
• Where did these figures come from?
• How can we update the plan without losing its history?

We built Velora Budgeting to give nonprofit finance teams a more connected place to answer those questions. It is designed to reduce the spreadsheet round trip, preserve a clearer plan of record, and support a financial planning process that can evolve as your organization does.

Start in the way that works for you

Not every budgeting process begins in the same place. Some teams want a blank canvas. Others want to use last year’s performance or build from a plan they already know.

Velora Budgeting gives you options. You can:

• Start from blank when you want complete control over the plan.
• Copy actuals from a prior year to use your financial history as a starting point.
• Copy a previous budget when you want to build on an existing plan.

From there, you can review income and expense accounts across each month of your fiscal year and adjust the figures to reflect your organization’s goals, expectations, and decisions.

No automatic final answer. No one-size-fits-all model. Your finance team reviews the plan and decides what belongs in it.

Publish a plan you can trust

A budget is more useful when everyone understands which version represents the organization’s plan.

When your budget is ready, you can publish it in Velora Budgeting to establish a protected baseline. That baseline becomes a clear record of the plan at that point in time.

And because plans change, Velora Budgeting is designed to preserve what happened next. Amendments and audit history help your team keep later updates traceable instead of silently replacing the budget you originally published.

That means you can more clearly distinguish between:

• The plan your organization published
• The changes made along the way
• The outlook your team is working with today

It’s a more transparent way to manage a plan that needs to evolve without losing its history.

Keep the budget closer to performance

Building the budget is only the beginning.

Velora Budgeting helps keep the plan connected to the financial information your team already uses in Aplos. Instead of treating the budget as a file that disappears after annual planning, your team can return to it, monitor performance, and update the plan as circumstances change.

The goal is simple: make the budget a living financial plan—one that remains useful after it is published.

Your existing budgets come with you

If your organization has already created budgets in Aplos, you won’t need to start over. Existing historical budgets move into Velora Budgeting automatically, giving you continued access to the plans you have already created.

Velora Budgeting opens in a dedicated tab and uses your existing Aplos login, so there is no separate account or additional sign-in to manage.

How to get started

Velora Budgeting is initially available only to Aplos Core customers.

To get started:

1. Select Budgeting [new] from your Aplos account.
2. Choose whether to start from blank, copy prior-year actuals, or copy a previous budget.
3. Review income and expense accounts across your fiscal months.
4. Adjust the figures to reflect your organization’s plan.
5. Publish the budget when you are ready to establish your baseline.
6. Return to the plan throughout the year to monitor performance and keep changes traceable.

If you don't see Budgeting [new] in your menu, you are not on an eligible Core subscription. But, stay tuned! Budgeting will soon be widely available.

A new home for budgeting in Aplos

Velora Budgeting is more than a visual update to the former budgeting tools in Aplos. It is a new, dedicated planning experience built to become the home for budgeting moving forward.

Over time, Velora Budgeting will replace the former budgeting solutions available in Aplos. We are taking a phased approach so customers can transition as the functionality they need becomes available. We will communicate clearly about timing, access, and any actions required along the way.

For customers using the former organization-level budgeting experience, historical budgets will remain available in Velora Budgeting. Customers who rely on more advanced dimensional workflows will receive separate guidance as those capabilities become available in the new product.

Our goal is to make the transition straightforward while protecting access to the budgeting history your organization depends on.

This is just the beginning

Velora Budgeting is still in its early stages, and the experience will continue to grow.

Coming functionality will make the product more useful for nonprofits with increasingly complex planning needs, including:

• Fund- and tag-level planning to add dimensional detail beneath budget lines
• Restriction context to help teams reflect how nonprofit resources can be used
• Basic grant tracking to connect grant periods, funds, documentation, and multi-year context to the plan
• Custom budgeting reports to bring more analysis into the same experience where the budget is managed

Looking further ahead, we see an opportunity to make planning more collaborative and forward-looking—giving additional budget contributors an appropriate way to participate and helping finance leaders evaluate potential outcomes through forecasting and scenarios.

That vision will take time, and we’ll continue to be clear about what is available now and what is still ahead. But the direction is straightforward: help nonprofit finance teams spend less time moving numbers between systems and more time making informed decisions about what comes next.

Build your next budget in Velora Budgeting

Your organization’s budget should be more than a static file. It should be a clear, connected plan your team can use throughout the year.

Velora Budgeting is the first step toward that future—and it’s ready for you to explore.