Recommendations for starting with Contributions

[pbumc]

Hi,

I'm working with a church that has been using PowerChurch 11.5 only for membership. Accounting is done in QuickBooks, and contribution tracking is done using a system of Excel spreadsheets. They are considering moving to PowerChurch for the contribution tracking while continuing with QuickBooks for accounting.

Any tips or suggestions about how to manage this transition?

I am anticipating that this will mean doing parallel entry into PowerChurch and the Excel system, probably going back to January 1, and checking that the totals match. There will be a lot of initial work to set up giving units (envelope numbers) and add all the designated funds.

Should I set up a test database to "play" with until I fully understand PowerChurch contributions? Or can I safely play in the live database, since the contribution module won't affect anything they're doing for membership?

Thanks,

[NeilZ]

Hi,

I'm working with a church that has been using PowerChurch 11.5 only for membership. Accounting is done in QuickBooks, and contribution tracking is done using a system of Excel spreadsheets. They are considering moving to PowerChurch for the contribution tracking while continuing with QuickBooks for accounting.

Any tips or suggestions about how to manage this transition?

I am anticipating that this will mean doing parallel entry into PowerChurch and the Excel system, probably going back to January 1, and checking that the totals match. There will be a lot of initial work to set up giving units (envelope numbers) and add all the designated funds.

Should I set up a test database to "play" with until I fully understand PowerChurch contributions? Or can I safely play in the live database, since the contribution module won't affect anything they're doing for membership?

Thanks,

In actuality, there isn't that much to understand in Contributions. Its fairly straightforward, you'll need to setup the envelope numbers under the Personal Profiles module of Membership. That can be the easy part if you use the Integrated Data Entry to find members, and then adding the numbers through that.

You'd then need to create Contribution Funds to cover the various areas where you accept funds, but I suspect that is a function of each one of the spreadsheets. Since you don't have the Accounting module setup, you shouldn't have to worry about account numbers when setting these up.

Once that's all done, before you start anything else, make copies of the spreadsheets, and create a new column for the envelope number and assign the envelope number from Powerchurch to the contributors on the spreadsheets. It will make it easier to enter the data to Powerchurch.

Then start from the 1st Sunday in 2015, and start entering the data. If you come across a contributor that's not in the membership module, you'll have to add them to the system.

Once you enter a few weeks worth of data, and cross-referencing it against the deposits and totals on the spreadsheets, you'll see that its actually much easier to use Powerchurch to do Contributions, and you can get rid of the spreadsheets altogether.

Eventually, I hope they decide to get rid of Quickbooks and use the built-in Accounting Modules.

[pbumc]

Thanks Neil, that's very helpful.

There is a new spreadsheet for each week, so I probably won't want to re-type envelope numbers into eight spreadsheets. I'll get to practice looking up contributors by name, which they'll be doing anyway. They have a few dozen account numbers defined in QuickBooks that I'll need to match.

Can't remember why, but they used the PowerChurch Accounting module maybe 10 years ago before switching to QuickBooks. It might have simply been a matter of an external bookkeeper already knowing QuickBooks. Meanwhile they're back to using volunteers, but again, QuickBooks familiarity is easier to come by. I do wish PowerChurch could easily handle multiple databases like QuickBooks. The advice in another thread on double-installing PowerChurch for testing wasn't too appealing.

[NeilZ]

Thanks Neil, that's very helpful.

There is a new spreadsheet for each week, so I probably won't want to re-type envelope numbers into eight spreadsheets. I'll get to practice looking up contributors by name, which they'll be doing anyway. They have a few dozen account numbers defined in QuickBooks that I'll need to match.

Can't remember why, but they used the PowerChurch Accounting module maybe 10 years ago before switching to QuickBooks. It might have simply been a matter of an external bookkeeper already knowing QuickBooks. Meanwhile they're back to using volunteers, but again, QuickBooks familiarity is easier to come by. I do wish PowerChurch could easily handle multiple databases like QuickBooks. The advice in another thread on double-installing PowerChurch for testing wasn't too appealing.

It really does not take much to install another copy of Powerchurch for testing. I have copies of v10.4, v11.1 & v11.5 installed on my desktop each with its own database. All you have to do is change the location of the installation rather than accept the default. Then when you start up the program just allow it to create a new database, and you have a testbed ready to go.