This is a hands-on tour. You will click through the live demonstration yourself, step by step, while this guide tells you exactly what to do. By the end you will have set your own words and lists, opened a case, written a note, logged a service against a funder, and exported the spreadsheet a grant report is built from.
Put the demonstration on one side and this walkthrough on the other so you can read a step and do it without flipping back and forth. Two monitors works best. On one screen, snap each window to half: click the demonstration window and press ⊞ + ←, then this window and press ⊞ + → (on Windows). The demonstration opens in a new tab when you click Launch the demonstration above.
The demonstration is a fully working copy of Case Management loaded with an invented agency called Riverbend Community Services: five people on file, five cases across open, waiting and closed, a run of notes, a year of logged services, and an intake queue with two requests waiting and one already turned down. There is no sign-in and nothing you do is saved to a real account, so click freely. A bar across the top says so, and reloading the page gives you a clean slate. Every person in it carries an example.org address, which is how you know none of them are real.
In the demonstration you stand in for the owner of that organization, so every setting is open to you, including the two on the Settings screen that only an owner or an admin can change in a real account.
One thing to know before you start, because it is unlike every other app here. Being a member of your organization is not enough to open Case Management. Only the owner, a member you have marked as Admin, or a member whose custom access list names Case Management can get in, and the read-only Viewer role is refused even the read. That is deliberate: a case note describes somebody's housing, family or health situation, which is not the same category of information as a donation record.
Your task: turn a year of casework into a number. You know your team helped people. You cannot say how many, or with what, or under which grant, without somebody spending a week reading notes. We are going to fix that at the point where the work happens instead of at the end of the grant year.
The demonstration opens on the Case Management Dashboard, and it is built to answer one question: what needs attention today. Read the five tiles across the top. Open cases and Waiting on something sit side by side, so a queue that is really a pile of things blocked on somebody else is visible as such. Active clients counts only the people you have not set to inactive. Services logged this month is the honest early warning that logging has slipped. Open with no note in 30 days turns red when it is not zero.
Underneath, Recently touched lists the last handful of cases anyone changed, so you can pick up where the team left off.
The left sidebar is how you move around: Dashboard, Cases, Clients, Service Log and Intake Requests, then Add a Case, Add a Client and Case Management Settings, then links across to Contact Manager, Volunteer Management, Impact and Outcomes, your Document Library and your Organization Calendar, and finally a Learn and help group and an Account group.
Do this: Read the five tiles and note which one is red. Then click Cases in the sidebar and look at the list: status pills reading Open, Waiting or Closed, and a badge only on the urgent and high ones so the rest stay quiet.
Why it matters: casework goes wrong quietly. A dashboard that only showed you totals would tell you nothing; these five tiles are chosen to show you the things that are slipping.
Click Case Management Settings. Start with What do you call the people you serve? Not every organization says clients. A school program says students, a membership organization says members, a family services agency usually says families. Pick from Clients, Participants, Members, Students or Families, and the sidebar, the headings and the labels all change to match.
Only the words you read change. Your saved records, the column names underneath and the CSV export keep their standard names, so a report you built last year still lines up with one you build today.
Then fill the four lists on the same screen, one entry per line: Your programs, Your funders, What you deliver, and How you count it. They fill the dropdowns everywhere else, and they are what makes the Service Log filter the way a grant report asks.
Do this: Switch the word to Families and press Save, then watch the sidebar and the headings change. Switch it back to Clients if you prefer. Now scroll down, read the four lists the demonstration organization already filled in, add one service of your own to What you deliver, and press Save all of it.
Why it matters: this is the twenty minutes that decides whether the app fits you. A service list you get wrong is cheap to change today and expensive to change after five hundred records are built on the wrong shape.
Click Add a Client in the sidebar, or whatever word you chose. Only the name is required. Everything else is optional, including the email address, because plenty of the people a nonprofit serves do not have one.
Household size is the one optional field worth filling in every time if you serve families. Most funders count people reached rather than records created, and a household of six is six people.
When somebody moves away or stops coming, set them to Inactive rather than deleting them. Inactive keeps them out of your working list while leaving last year's numbers intact. The app will refuse to delete anybody who still has a case attached, for the same reason.
Do this: Add a person with a name, a phone number and a household size, then open the Clients list and find them. Open somebody who is already there and read their record: how to reach them, their case count, and the buttons to edit them or open a new case.
Why it matters: a record with nothing but a name is a perfectly good record. Making the form demand more than you have is how a system stops getting used in the first week.
Click Add a Case in the sidebar, or Open a new case from somebody's record. A case is one piece of work with a beginning and an end: eviction prevention, winter heating, a job search.
The Short title should say what this case is about in a few words. "Eviction prevention", not "Housing". Program comes from the list you filled in Settings. Status is Open when somebody is working it, Waiting on something when the next move is not yours, and Closed when it ended. Priority badges only the urgent and high ones. Assigned to records who is responsible, and by default it is a label rather than a lock: it does not restrict who can read the case, unless your organization turns on the setting in step 10.
What they came for is the presenting need, in their words where you can get them. It is what a colleague picking this up cold needs first, and it is often not what the case turns out to be about.
Do this: Open a case on the person you just added, with a real title and a real presenting need. Then set its priority to urgent, save, and find it in the Cases list carrying its badge.
Why it matters: if somebody comes back next year for something different, open a second case rather than reopening the first. Two clean cases tell a truer story than one that ran for three years, and they count correctly.
Open a case and the note box is the first thing under the case details. Pick What kind of contact it was (a phone call, a home visit, an office visit, an email, a referral, an assessment, a case plan, a closing summary), check the date, and write what happened, what was agreed, and what happens next. Press Save the note and it lands on the case stamped with the date and whoever wrote it.
Notes are a record, so they are not freely erasable. Whoever wrote a note can take it back within a day, which covers a genuine mistake. After that, the correction is a new note saying what was wrong and what is right, which is what an auditor, a funder or a court would expect to see.
Under the note box there is a checkbox to keep this note between you and an owner or admin. A note saved that way is readable by the person who wrote it and by an owner or an admin, and by nobody else, including the caseworker the case is assigned to. It carries a gray Restricted tag. Somebody who cannot read one is not told it exists: it is left out of the case, out of the note count and out of the last note date, because a date on its own would advertise it.
There is no AI drafting anywhere in this app, and that is a decision rather than an omission. Other All In One Nonprofit apps draft donor letters and grant narratives. Drafting somebody's case note from other case notes is not something we are willing to ship without a great deal more thought.
Do this: Write a note on your case in a full sentence, save it, and watch it appear underneath. Then write a second one with the restricted box ticked and look at the tag it carries.
Why it matters: a note written a week later is a summary of what you remember, which is a different thing. Everybody who has ever tried to reconstruct a month of casework knows it.
Below the notes on every case there is a Service log. Each entry is one thing you actually delivered: What was provided, the date, How much, and the unit it is Counted in. The program fills itself in from the case and you can change it for a one-off. Then press Log the service.
The Funder box is optional and it is the single highest-value field in the app. Tagging services with the funder paying for them is the whole difference between a log you have to rebuild at reporting time and one you can hand over.
Pick the unit your funders ask for rather than the one that is easiest to count: 42 meals, 1.5 hours, 6 nights, 180 dollars.
Do this: On your case, log Case management for 1.5 Hours and pick a funder from the list. Then log a second one, Food assistance for 42 Meals, under a different funder, so the report in the next step has something to separate.
Why it matters: "Case management, 1.5 hours" feels like it does not need writing down, right up until the day somebody asks how many hours of case management your organization delivered last year and the honest answer is that nobody knows.
Click Service Log in the sidebar. This is everything your organization delivered, in one place, filtered the way a grant report asks for it. Set From and To to the period the report covers, pick a Funder, optionally narrow by Program or Service, and press Show.
You get two figures at the top: Service records and the number of people served, which is your unduplicated count of people who received something under that filter. Below them, By service and By program are your outputs tables, already added up with their units. Below those, every underlying row.
Export as CSV gives you those rows as a spreadsheet, ready to paste into a report or attach to it as your evidence file. The export uses the standard column names rather than the word you chose in step 2, so a funder reading it needs no explanation of your house language.
Do this: Set the dates to cover the last year, pick County Human Services in the funder box, and press Show. Read the people served figure, then read the By service table. Now change the funder to United Way and press Show again and watch both change. Finally press Export as CSV and open the file you get.
Why it matters: the numbers are only as good as the logging. A service nobody recorded is a service you cannot claim, and the most common cause of an understated grant report is a busy month where the notes were written and the log was not.
Go back to the Dashboard and look at Open with no note in 30 days. When it is not zero the tile turns red and a line underneath spells it out. The Cases list badges the same cases, so you can work down from the oldest note.
An open case with no note in a month is usually the case nobody picked back up rather than a case that is going well. Nothing in the app closes it for you or nudges the person you serve; it simply refuses to let it disappear from view.
Do this: Read the quiet count on the dashboard, then open the Cases list, find the case it is pointing at, and add a note to it. Come back to the dashboard and watch the count fall.
Why it matters: every organization that has ever lost track of somebody lost track of them slowly. This is the one screen built to catch that while it is still a month rather than a year.
Everywhere else on the platform, anyone in your organization can read and only the read-only Viewer role is stopped from writing. Here that is reversed: nobody reads anything until you say so, one person at a time.
The organization's owner is in. A member you have marked as Admin is in. A member whose custom access list names Case Management is in. A member with full access to everything else is not in until you add it deliberately, a member on a preset role is not in until you add it deliberately, and the read-only Viewer role is refused even the read.
You grant it on the My Organization page at https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/team/: find the person under People and Access, set their access to Custom, and tick Case Management. That is one deliberate action per person, which is the point.
Do this: Open https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/team/ in your real account when you are ready to bring somebody in, and add Case Management to exactly the people who do casework. Nobody else in your organization will even see that a case exists.
Why it matters: letting somebody in is the first decision, and it is separate from the second one below. Getting the first one wrong is the mistake that cannot be undone by an apology.
Back on Case Management Settings, the first card is Who can open which case, and it has two modes. The default is Everyone admitted to this app sees every case, which suits most organizations of two or three staff: assigning a case records who is responsible and hides nothing. The other is A caseworker sees only their own cases, where a caseworker sees the cases assigned to them plus any single case they have been added to, and everything else, including the people attached to it and the services logged against it, is not on their screen at all.
An owner and an admin see everything in either mode. Somebody has to be able to answer for the whole file, and somebody has to be able to pick up a case when a caseworker leaves. Only an owner or an admin can change the setting, because a permission the person it restricts can switch off is not a permission.
Turning the second mode on also grows a Who else is on this case card at the top of every case. An owner or an admin can add a colleague there, which lets them open that one case and nothing else. It is the answer to "my supervisor needs to see the Vega file" without handing over the cabinet. Only an owner or an admin can add somebody, for the same reason as above.
Restricted mode is off unless you turn it on, so nothing changes for an organization that never opens this setting. If you do turn it on, every screen that is showing a shorter list says so plainly rather than presenting a partial list as the whole one.
Do this: In the demonstration, open Settings, switch the card to A caseworker sees only their own cases and press Save. Now open any case and find the sharing card that appeared at the top. Switch the setting back when you have seen it.
Why it matters: a restricted note and a restricted case are privacy controls between colleagues, not encryption and not a legal privilege. An owner or an admin can read everything, and so can anyone you later make one.
The last card on Settings is A public link people can ask for help through. It is off unless you turn it on. When it is on, your organization has one link you can print on a flyer, put on your website, or hand to a partner agency, and it looks like https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/case-intake/?org=yourslug. There is no account and no sign-in for the person using it: somebody asking a nonprofit for help should never have to become a user of a software platform first.
The same card has a box for a short introduction. Write who you serve and what happens next, in your own words. "We serve Riverbend and Northside. Somebody will call you within two business days" saves a great many wasted requests and a great many disappointed people. The form itself asks for a name, what they need, and one way to reach them; everything else is optional, because a form that demands an address from somebody who does not have one is a form that stops the people who most need it.
Nothing anybody sends becomes a record on its own. Every submission waits in Intake Requests under a Waiting tab, alongside Accepted and Declined tabs with counts. A waiting request is not a person on file, it is not a case, and it does not appear in any count, any report or any export until somebody here decides.
Accept creates the person and a case, and puts what they wrote on the case as its first note, in their own words. It asks first whether they are already on file, so you attach it to the existing record instead of creating a second one, and it lets you name the case, set the program and assign it. Decline keeps the request and your reason, and sends the person nothing automatically: declining is a record for you, not a message to them, and that record is the part your organization has to be able to answer for later. Delete is an owner or admin decision and erases the request outright, the person's words with it. You are emailed when a request arrives, so a queue nobody opens does not become a week of silence.
Do this: Open Intake Requests and read the two waiting. Press Accept on one, leave it on "Add them as new", name the case, and save. Now open the case it created and read the first note: their words, unedited. Then go back and Decline the other with a real reason, and look at the Declined tab.
Why it matters: the gap between "somebody asked us for help" and "we opened a case" is a decision your organization makes, and it should look like one on the screen.
Every All In One Nonprofit app shares one secure, organization-wide Document Library. The Document Library link sits in the sidebar and opens the Library in a new tab, where your whole team can find any file you have saved.
There is deliberately no file upload inside a case. A signed release, a lease, an award letter or an identity document goes to the Library, so there is one place to find a document and one set of retention rules covering it rather than two.
Do this: Find Document Library in the sidebar and open it, so you know where a case file belongs before somebody hands you one.
Why it matters: one shared home for your documents means nothing lives only on one person's computer, and the current version is always easy to find.
If you ever get stuck, the Contact support link in the sidebar opens a help request tied to your account at https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/support/?app=Case%20Management. You describe what you need, send it, and our team replies by email, and you can follow the whole conversation from the support page.
Do this: Click Contact support in the sidebar to see the request form. If you are weighing this app against a dedicated case management system, tell us what your funders ask you to report and we will tell you honestly whether this covers it.
Why it matters: real help from real people is part of the product, so you are never left staring at a blank screen on your own.
You set your own words and lists, opened a case, wrote a note the same day, logged what you delivered against the funder paying for it, and pulled the spreadsheet a grant report is built from. Do that as the work happens and the end of the grant year stops being a week of reading notes. Explore any other part of the demonstration, or reload it and try it your own way.