Best practice for Fund vs. Accounts

[uccnr]

Hello,

We've inherited a partially implemented PowerChurch system at a small church and we are trying to determine how to move forward. We were thinking of setting up Funds by Ministry(e.g., 01-General, 02-Christian Education, 03=Planned Giving, 04-Property, 05=Youth Ministry, etc....) so we could run the built-in fund reports to show each Ministry its intake/expense. We noticed the Fund matrix report that show each Account and which funds if is allocated to. However in our current setup, we have only one Fund (01-General) and we also see in the PowerChurch demo system that there is only a single Fund. This is a really important concept and we want to understand the best practice for Funds... what are they for and does anyone use them for Ministries. Theh alternative seems to be using sub-accounts but we didn't find the reporting along this dimension to be what the Ministry chairpeople would like to see in a report.

Thank you for any suggestions you can provide!
Jim.

[JohnDMeyers]

Typical fund groupings are:

General Fund (operational activities of the church)
Missions Fund
Church school
Planned giving (depending on the number of accounts)
Building Fund (during construction phase especially)

Youth ministry is typically run in the General Fund, unless you have a lot of accounts and a lot of activity. Building assets would also be typically in the General Fund, unless there are a lot of properties, a lot of building activity, or a construction project.

To create a new fund, it is usually easier to copy the chart of accounts from the General Fund, and add, delete and modify accounts in the new fund. For example, the missions fund will typically have a checking account, income account, expense account, equity account, etc., plus all the Group accounts that make it look neat. By copying the chart of accounts, all of the basic structure is copied. You can modify the check account number as necessary, in the new fund.