How to automate expense management in Aplos

Key takeaways

• Aplos is fund accounting for nonprofits and churches, and every transaction requires a fund.
• Its Plaid bank integration pulls in card account activity to code in registers, one line at a time.
• An Aplos admin enables the Open API from settings and generates the keys.
• Vergo proposes account and fund for each card purchase and records transactions through the API.

Where should you go next?

• Vergo's Aplos integration
• What expense management software integrates with Aplos?
• Get started with Vergo

How do you automate expense management in Aplos, step by step?

1. Turn on the Open API. An Aplos administrator enables it in settings and generates a key. Vergo then reads your accounts and funds.
2. Keep your organisation's cards. Connecting your existing cards involves no card applications, no re-issuing and no banking change.
3. Receipts by text. Staff and volunteers with cards reply with a photo. Employees handle everything by text message — no app to download, no portal login — and Vergo chases missing receipts itself instead of waiting for a report.
4. Confirm account and fund. Vergo proposes both for every line, citing how similar purchases were coded.
5. Record in Aplos. The coded transaction is written through the Open API with account and fund on each line.

What does Aplos need on each card purchase?

• Expense account from your chart of accounts.
• Fund: required on every Aplos transaction.
• Tag, optionally, for programmes or events, similar to a class.
• Receipt for audits and grant reporting.

Where does Aplos stop and automation start?

The bank integration brings the charge in; coding it is still a person looking at a line that says a warehouse store and deciding whether it was the youth programme or the food pantry, and which fund pays. Grant-funded purchases get that decision wrong at their peril. Vergo reads the receipt itself, line by line, and proposes the account and fund from what was bought and who bought it.

A practical example

A church on Aplos gives cards to its youth pastor and facilities manager. The youth pastor buys retreat supplies and a projector bulb for the sanctuary on one trip. Vergo gets the receipt by text and suggests the youth ministry fund and supplies account for the retreat items, and the general fund with facilities for the bulb, showing past purchases coded the same way. The bookkeeper confirms, and both lines are recorded in Aplos.

How Vergo handles this

Vergo proposes the coding by inference from your own accounting structure and history — no rule library to build, no keyword lists to maintain, and new vendors are coded on first sight. For Aplos, the fund is proposed alongside the account, because a correct account on the wrong fund is still a reporting problem. Approval workflows are optional and fit how you already control spend: route by GL account, by amount, or by project — or skip approval flows entirely and let policy flags catch only what breaks a rule. Card spend, employee reimbursements and AP invoices run through one coding model — same coding, same review, one reconciliation — and payment stays on the rails you already use.