Payment Voucher

[cbrown]

We are fairly new to PowerChurch and are using version 11.5. We use a system of paper Payment Requests (vouchers) for many disbursements of cash. For instance, if the Mission Committee Chair needs to have a check sent to Habitat for Humanity, he writes a paper voucher which the assistant treasurer then writes a manual check for. I'm trying to help the process be more efficient and want to start using PC for check writing. I'm thinking that we could create vendors for each committee chair that requests checks and enter the request into PC as an invoice from the "vendor" and then print a PC generated check. The result is a PC record of all parts of the transaction. Does this make accounting sense? Is there a better way? Thanks.

[NeilZ]

We are fairly new to PowerChurch and are using version 11.5. We use a system of paper Payment Requests (vouchers) for many disbursements of cash. For instance, if the Mission Committee Chair needs to have a check sent to Habitat for Humanity, he writes a paper voucher which the assistant treasurer then writes a manual check for. I'm trying to help the process be more efficient and want to start using PC for check writing. I'm thinking that we could create vendors for each committee chair that requests checks and enter the request into PC as an invoice from the "vendor" and then print a PC generated check. The result is a PC record of all parts of the transaction. Does this make accounting sense? Is there a better way? Thanks.

You really do not want to make the committee chair the 'Vendor' as that is NOT who will be getting the check. You should setup each entity that gets a check as the vendor. Using your example, you want to have Habitat for Humanity as the vendor, payee on the check.

Then you will be able to track how much the mission committee is sending to that organization as the check will have the expense account for the mission committee.

You then take the payment voucher, staple the check stub to that voucher, and file it in paid bills. This way at the end of the year you have a full audit trail as to who got the check (Habitat), who authorized it, and what expense account it was paid out of (printed on the stub).

Eventually, you will want to setup a list of accounts for each committee that they can budget against. For example, the building/property committee has accounts for electricity, gas and phone, each of which is budgeted against based on prior years expenses.

If the mission committee gives regularly to the Habitat, you can setup an expense account for Habitat and they can budget an amount that they will send each year. In this way you know exactly how much the church is sending out for mission, and how much is being spent on normal day-to-day operations.

[cbrown]

Neil - thanks for the quick response. What you say makes perfect sense and I should have thought of it. Sounds like paper vouchers from the committees is the way to go, then the assistant treasurer can set up the check-writing capability in PC. Thanks again.

[NeilZ]

Neil - thanks for the quick response. What you say makes perfect sense and I should have thought of it. Sounds like paper vouchers from the committees is the way to go, then the assistant treasurer can set up the check-writing capability in PC. Thanks again.

FWIW .. we do this on 'non-standard' payments. Things like regular utilities we don't as that's a standard part of 'doing business', but if something is authorized by the church board and registered in the meeting minutes we use the minutes as the authorization and attach a copy of that to the check stub.