Balance - 2026 Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

Balance is cloud-based endowment accounting software designed for nonprofits, higher education institutions, and foundations that manage endowed and restricted funds. The platform centralizes the full fund accounting lifecycle, covering unitization, investment allocation, policy-driven spending calculations, fund activity tracking, reconciliation, and reporting. Finance offices, auditors, foundation teams, investment staff, and donor relations partners use Balance to replace spreadsheet-based workflows with a structured, auditable system.

Core capabilities include automated unitization across all endowed funds, ensuring each fund receives an accurate share of investment gains and losses. Spending policy automation supports market-value-based, hybrid, inflation-adjusted, and custom formula configurations, eliminating manual calculation overhead. Fund structure management maintains detailed records of gifts, transfers, earnings, fees, and distributions while enforcing donor restrictions and fund hierarchies. Reconciliation tools compare custodial statements against fund balances to surface and resolve discrepancies efficiently, and audit support features provide documentation and fund activity detail on demand. Fund-level reporting delivers real-time market value, historical gift data, and available spending figures, with controlled access permissions for both internal and external stakeholders.

Balance integrates with major accounting and ERP platforms including Workday, PeopleSoft, Oracle/FRS, NetSuite, Jenzabar, Blackbaud Financial Edge, Ellucian/Banner Finance, and Ellucian/Colleague Finance, allowing allocation data and spending summaries to be exported without disrupting existing workflows. Security infrastructure includes HECVAT certification, annual SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II audits, TLS-encrypted sessions, per-client isolated databases, and multi-factor authentication.