“Real” tech systems for small nonprofit?

"I run a tiny nonprofit (4 staff, ~600k budget) and this came up again yesterday when our program manager’s laptop died mid-site visit and we realized our donor spreadsheet exists in like 5 different versions.

​

I’ve been looking at whether we should grow up from Google sheets + random shared drives into an actual setup - like a simple ERP/accounting + CRM + maybe some reporting tools in one place. I know bigger orgs use stuff based on Microsoft Dynamics, Power Platform, etc. One vendor I saw mentioned Tigunia as an example of a firm that helps hook all that together for nonprofits, which sent me down a late-night research spiral.

​

My board is nervous about cost and staff capacity, and honestly I’m not sure if I’m thinking about this the right way either. Are we too small for this kind of thing? Has anyone here moved from spreadsheets/QuickBooks/patchwork CRMs into a more integrated system and actually felt the impact on fundraising, reporting, audits, sanity?

​

If you’ve done it, what size were you, what did you choose, and what do you wish you’d known before signing anything?"