Great software for gala and auction

Overall, it was great to have this software for the entire organizing process of our hospital gala. We are talking a very elaborate event with about 250 guests, 100+ donors, and over 150 auction items. In the past all of these things got tracked in multiple spread sheets and if anything changed, it would have been a disaster. This year, using Auctria, everything was in one place, very easy to see in detail or at a glance. If guests or meals or seating arrangements changed, it was so easy to do and follow and just to stay on top of it. I realized, that even though I have been using this system for a few month prior to our gala, there are still many functions we have never even touched. I would highly recommend this software and am extremely glad I did decide for this particular software (never used any other one, but wouldn't switch), but also recommend to take the time to read the manual, play around and take time to understand the many many function to utilize it to its best potential.

Pros

I enjoyed how intuitive the use of the software was. Anything I wanted to do, was possible with this software. There were a couple times were I would provide my volunteers with a log in and they basically figured it out on their own as it was very easy to use and understand the software. Setting up the website, took a little time, but also once I understood how it worked, not a big deal. Enjoyed that I had all info from guests names, seating arrangements, auction items, donors and supporters and much more all handy in one place. Made the reconciliation at the end very easy. I did use an outside budget for this time, but think in the future I would purely use Auctria for that as well. Now that the event is over, it is great to still be able to see all the guests info and pull all different reports we may want to see. The customer service was great in answering any questions I had ahead of time via email, but unfortunately I was never given a phone number to connect with them on the spot. And as it is most often for me, I usually wait with doing something until it needs o be done now and if I couldn't get an instant answer I had to wait and get back at it later. Not their fault, more my own, but I wished sometimes there would have been a live chat or phone number to call. Even though, usually their replies came within a couple hours or overnight as I am on the west coast.

Cons

There isn't much I didn't like.
I guess the only thing I didn't understand until we were at the event was that we had the 0.3% charge on Auctria per transaction + the 2.69% on Stripe. The system does show the option to add those fees to the invoice, but we didn't realize it until it was too late. So now we have to cover a pretty large invoice of stripe fees we didn't expect. Anyways, more my fault for not paying attention to ahead of time. But in the future I would certainly add that to the guest check-out or if they want to not pay it, just charge more on our credit card machines then through the system.

I also had a couple guests that commented that they weren't able to go back into their registration and make changes to their guest list or meal selection. This must have been a glitch in the system, but wasn't a big deal.
For my side, I found it a little confusing with the e-tickets and ticket statements and such, as they weren't fully clear to me what each of them was about and even more so, I thought I had it set up that everyone how registered would receive it automatically. This was only the case for the people that self-registered but not the ones I added manually.

The BEST bang for your buck and more

Overall, for having this be the first and only auction software I've ever used, this has been an amazing experience. I loved learning the ins and outs of Auctria, and strongly recommend it for smaller auctions, and if the slight kinks are worked out, strongly recommend it for big auctions. There's a lot of potential with Auctria, and I'm hoping they succeed. I think they will

Pros

I loved most everything Auctria has to offer.

1.) The team there is phenomenal. I don't think I've ever gotten such instant quality support on anything so consistently in my ENTIRE life. Literally, when I send a support email, I expect a reply back in maybe a day or two. Auctria responds in less than 3 hours, sometimes in literally HALF an hour. amazing.

2.) Even without all my nonsense questions, the guides that Auctria has are very detailed and I could relatively easily figure everything out myself – which I mostly did, but it's nice having the Auctria team to ask questions to. Especially since they're so accessible!

3.) Their features to capture donor information is second to none. My favorite thing about Auctria is how they made the capture of information BEFORE the event so simple and easy. The only thing that sucks was having to input "guest" information at the event, but Auctria tied every guest to the purchaser, so even then, they covered bases by allowing us to know who to contact if we needed something from someone.

4.) From silent auctions, to online, to even live, Auctria literally covers everything so well and seamlessly.

5.) Checking out final bids is so easy. no chasing down people for cc information – with maybe one or two who for some reason chose not to register their card.

Cons

1.) Auctria's only con that I found so far was with it's app and online bidding. I didn't find online bidding so seamless, when someone needs either an email address/bidding number and a password in order to log in. As I was testing the app, I found befuddled on why someone needed a password, and found that some people weren't able to make a password, effectively not allowing them to bid online.

I rectified this with having online kiosks, but we definitely lost some money because of this. We might not use Auctria next year because of this which saddens me. Making the online bidding process simpler though would make my team change their minds I'm sure.

Excellent Product. Worth every single cent!

Accurate accounting of the major fundraiser (other than our annual operating fund campaign) for our church. Also ability to maintain and manage accounts receivable (we don't take payment on the night of our auction). Help in recruiting volunteers for the auction - volunteer data entry is easier to come by when the data entry can be done remotely and is easy to learn. Our church is just a medium-sized one (350 members) and we cannot afford to spend thousands to have someone come in and run our yearly auctions. A yearly cost of less than what we pay is far less than the value we receive for this software. Our auctions have reached thousands od dollars in income the past two years. We are very excited about that. My ONLY concern is that should Auctria go out of business that we would lose all our data. THAT would be awful. I would hope and pray that we would be offered CSV files of all our data before it "disappeared."

Pros

Multi-user, retention of data by auction, emailing of invoices and donation receipts, and the ability to copy data from one auction to the next. Exceptional customer support and response. Our church uses this software so our auction's donors and bidders are mostly the same people. We auction items that have multiple winners (gourmet dinners, themed parties, etc. ). A few emails back and forth was all it took to get the software to handle this accurately. I searched quite a long while for a replacement for our ancient software (that was a multi-user nightmare) and I hit the jackpot when finding Charity Auction Organizer. I am a retired programmer/analyst and this software was easy to learn, has excellent Help, and the personalized support we needed. Taking awhile to get used to the newest version with Auctria, but we'll get there. Have used this product for four of our church's auctions and one other non-profit auction. We'll be using it again November 2018.

Auctria is Amazing!

Check out for our gala was always the most stressful part of the event. Auctria makes us look like pros. No more waiting in lines divided by the alphabet; any volunteer station can help any guest. There are no more piles of paper to sort and add the bids by hand. We honestly have very short lines at checkout which makes our last impression of the evening a good impression. In additions, we now have a great database of information about all aspects of our gala.

Pros

Auctria is so easy to use which is very important. My favorite feature is the amazing customer service. We've used Auctria for 4 years and Auctria makes improvements every year. They don't just make changes, they make IMPROVEMENTS. They incorporate the changes in a suttle way so we aren't completely re-training our volunteers every year, we just have to point out the new features.

Cons

The first year most of the credit cards were rejected because of the processor. The next year Auctria incorporated Authorize.net which enabled a variety of processors to work with Auctria. We used the processor we normally use for processing cards online and everything went smoothly.

Miamisburg Rotary Club - Auction

We've been using Auctria twice a year for 4 or 5 years for our Rotary Club Charity Auction and for our local Merchants Association Charity Auction. Of the different options, Auctria provides the best functionality and services for the price.

Pros

Auctria is an immense help for our organization with tracking bidders, item, accounts and reporting all associated data with our charitable auction. We save a LOT of time and effort over using our own spreadsheets.

Cons

There are minor adjustments to functionality that may help with some of our internal uses. The Auctria staff has looked into some of our ideas, (some dealing with pre-loading bidder numbers) but while it couldn't be done exactly as we had imagined, they were able to help us with a work around to meet our needs. Another occasional glitch is when a silent auction item fails to get the minimum bid, but was allowed to be purchased for below the minimum bid amount, we aren't always able to override the minimum, but have to go in and manually lower the minimum to be able to process the sale. Not a biggie, just a time consuming action (that I believe we've figured another work around for that). Overall, there aren't any significant "cons".

Auctions Made Easy

I just finished my 6th auction using Auctria, and will happily be renewing my account for next year's auction. Every year they have added new features or tweaked current features so that the software is more robust and easy to use. Tech support is responsive and clear in their answers, and the help documents are easily accessible and clearly written. It has made the entire process of putting on our auction much simpler and fun!

Pros

We needed an easier way to check our bidders in and out than on paper with a calculator. We got much more with this software. It scales to handle any size auction and offers features to not only check your bidders in and out, but build a website, print the catalogs, print the bid sheets, and anything else you'd like to be able to do for your auction. And it's easy to use once you are familiar with the user interface.

Cons

It took some time getting familiar with how things work in the software to become comfortable with it.

Easy to use and full of options

Our non-profit organization has used Auctria for 5 years and each year we learn more and more about what it offers. The manual is easy to follow and, as the Treasurer, the variety of financial reports are wonderful.

Pros

There are so many options to make our fundraising event successful including helping us build a website and making online catalogs for our auctions. I also like that there are several ways to get to the same destination. You don’t have to click on one option, there are many hyperlinks that can get you where you need to be.

Cons

We have used this software for several years but this year was the first time we attempted to register credit cards at check-in. That part went very well, but when we added winning bids and other activity to the bidder profile we did not realize it would charge their card at that moment, if we didn’t enter the bid in a certain way. We also had one user who, when processing card payments, would charge the donor the processing fee, so we had to go back and refund each of them, which was time consuming. This was a learning curve for us and something we should have read in the Manual before we attempted it. We easily resolved it and now we know exactly what to do for next year.

Fantastic User Friendly Program

Auctria is a terrific product, and I recommend it to all of my clients and colleagues. It is a great value for the money, easy to use, and has incredible functionality.

Pros

Auctria is very intuitive, and so much easier to use than other nonprofit event softwares on the market. The database function is straight-forward and doesn't have too many layers to it, so data entry is really fast. The website, ticket sales component, donor/guest information, and night of event entry all sync together really well. It takes less than 5 minutes to train volunteers on guest registration, and the materials are quality. Any time that I have had an issue, which hasn't been often, Auctria will get back to me quickly with a solution.

Cons

The only thing I would change would be to make the display sheets a little more dynamic, so they could be individually altered. Perhaps if there were an option to download them as a Word file, it would make it easier to adjust text sizing, photo sizing, etc. Also, it would be great if Auctria had a mobile bidding component.

Faubion School PTA has had an exceptional experience with Auctria software!

Our school auction takes place every spring, does profit every year and sustains our PTA budget through the following year. We make enough to need a software system but we don't make enough to spend bookoo bucks on it. Auctria does everything we need including -*organizing and selling items *offering receipts to donors and buyers *offering customizable website that is easy to create and share *allowing for many check out options including online, in person and push text notifications *option to pass credit card fees on to buyer so that our school can keep more money for our kids. Auctria is the only software that we will use going forward and I highly recommend!!!

Pros

Easy to use and train others to use, many customizable options for sellable items, website is awesome and tutorials on creating website are very helpful, cost is the lowest in the industry which is much needed for our non-profit school event. We used Auctria at our annual school auction this year and it did everything we needed and more for a fraction of the software that we have used in the past. Hint -- there is also a way to pass on credit card sales fees to credit card users which saved us those fees. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!!!

Cons

Our auction chair had a few questions and couldn't find a number to call. She emailed and got a response back in 24 hours, which is their promise. For what it's worth, our software company before this one had the same policy and cost 10 times more so I don't feel like this is a deal breaker for us.

Fund Raising Software

We have saved money not hiring someone to help fun our fundraisers and we are doing a better job the company we hired. It is very time consuming for the person in charge of the software.. It would be hard to replace me in doing this job after I have done it for 2 years. Huge learning curve.

Pros

It links everything for running a fundraiser into one area. Ticket sales, live and silent auctions and donations. We can now do our own check in and check out at the event where we had been paying a company to do it and they were doing a very poor job. People attending our fundriaser have commented on the smooth check in and out process now that we are doing it ourselves with this software.

Cons

It take a lot of time to learn to do the different things in the software. I spend hours each year learning how to use it and setting it up and training others. Could have a more user interface.