New to this software

[AssemblyChurch]

Hello, Sorry for my lack of intelligence in the area of accounting. We have been using Quickbook software for the church for many years and although it has been fine, the church is slowly growing and we needed a more church related software to track members, baptisms, etc. Powerchurch Plus fits the bill perfectly. My main difficulty is that I am having trouble understanding, or maybe a better explanation is that I need to know the Best way to set up ministry accounts. We have only 4 active ministries at the moment. I have always kept a running spreadsheet with their balances, but was hoping to avoid that with this software, that it could/would keep balances automatically so I am not responsible for manually keeping up with their money. Any help would be appreciated. I am also only part-time with hopes they will hire a full time secretary soon, but want to set it up so the next person can just take over smoothly. Again I'm not trained in accounting & only have a very basic understanding from simple "learn as I go" methods. Don't worry though, the books are in order and money is safe Lol

[NeilZ]

Hello, Sorry for my lack of intelligence in the area of accounting. We have been using Quickbook software for the church for many years and although it has been fine, the church is slowly growing and we needed a more church related software to track members, baptisms, etc. Powerchurch Plus fits the bill perfectly. My main difficulty is that I am having trouble understanding, or maybe a better explanation is that I need to know the Best way to set up ministry accounts. We have only 4 active ministries at the moment. I have always kept a running spreadsheet with their balances, but was hoping to avoid that with this software, that it could/would keep balances automatically so I am not responsible for manually keeping up with their money. Any help would be appreciated. I am also only part-time with hopes they will hire a full time secretary soon, but want to set it up so the next person can just take over smoothly. Again I'm not trained in accounting & only have a very basic understanding from simple "learn as I go" methods. Don't worry though, the books are in order and money is safe Lol

Have you looked at the Powerchurch Manual ?? The manual, starting on page 175, has a good overview of accounting, so you can get an idea of what you're going to have to do.

What we need to be able to give you an idea of how to setup the system, is this:

1. Are all the ministries funded separately? That is, do they have their own checking accounts, or are they all funded out of one account.
2. When you talk about 'keeping balances' are you talking about a budget balance ?? Are they allocated a certain amount each year for use?

If you could be very specific, we can then give better answers.

[AssemblyChurch]

The ministry funds are all from one General Account, yes. They no longer have separate checking accounts. They each have their own "accounts" that I manually track with an excel spreadsheet. I guess the easiest explanation is that they have "mock" checking accounts that I keep manually. There is "Chart of Accounts" in the current Quickbooks that we are using, but it does not keep running balances of accounts (I do not think it was set up this way from the beginning, this program was set up YEARS ago), the QB just keeps track of income/expense that I then print on a report and plug in numbers to the excel sheet. I know this is probably the strangest way to do this, and I've just come in on this and kept it going. This is the reason for the new software. The ministries do not really have a "budget" their money is their own...so with this being said, would the best way of setting this up be to "budget" their money and leave it unrestricted? Sorry this seems more complicated than it needs to be

[NeilZ]

The ministry funds are all from one General Account, yes. They no longer have separate checking accounts. They each have their own "accounts" that I manually track with an excel spreadsheet. I guess the easiest explanation is that they have "mock" checking accounts that I keep manually. There is "Chart of Accounts" in the current Quickbooks that we are using, but it does not keep running balances of accounts (I do not think it was set up this way from the beginning, this program was set up YEARS ago), the QB just keeps track of income/expense that I then print on a report and plug in numbers to the excel sheet. I know this is probably the strangest way to do this, and I've just come in on this and kept it going. This is the reason for the new software. The ministries do not really have a "budget" their money is their own...so with this being said, would the best way of setting this up be to "budget" their money and leave it unrestricted? Sorry this seems more complicated than it needs to be

OK ... I see what you have there. What you can do is setup each ministry as its own Accounting Fund in Fund Accounting, IE:

Operations (staff salaries etc); Fund 01
Missions: Fund 02
Building: Fund 03

and so on. Each would use the same checking account as the bank account. You can then add expense accounts as required in each fund. The system will then track the balance for you automatically. You can then report on those balances using the built-in Fund Balance Report, and issue a separate Income/Expense report to each ministry.

The accounting setup assistant can walk you through some of this. My advice is this:

1. If you have not yet installed the software, do so. If you have installed the software, and Membership data is being entered, do a backup of the entire database for insurance.

2. Start testing with the Accounting Setup Assistant to get your self familiar with it, and what it expects you to have. You can restart Accounting once you finish getting familiar, and the system will clear everything and you will have a clean slate.
The restarting of accounting WILL NOT affect anything else in the system Membership or Contributions. So you can be assured that nothing you do in Accounting will lose you data in other areas.

And as you have questions, please ask here.

I also advise that you think about taking the paid, online Accounting tutorials offered by Powerchurch. Yes they may seem pricey, but once purchased, you indefinite access to them, and you and/or staff in your church can view them as many times as needed:

https://www.powerchurch.com/training/vi ... .php?id=14
https://www.powerchurch.com/training/vi ... .php?id=15
https://www.powerchurch.com/training/vi ... .php?id=13