User Support Forum

Im the treasurer for our church. We are not big, and my job is rather easy, but time consuming due to the way I inherited to do things (eahc month consisting of a few excel spreadsheets).

We have no staff. All we have are contributions (no pledges), and expenses (utilities, supplies, etc). We support some commended workers, but that is nothing more than a check every other month. We have 1 bank account (checking).

On the reports, we have several "buckets" where we show the money.. these are related to our chart of account groupings (1000 is our 'missionary' account, with 1005 being money goung out to worker A, 1010 being worker B, etc).

What would be the right way of setting up the software to work like that? For the most part all money that comes in just goes into the "unallocated" account, and when we write checks off another account (such as to 1005 to worker A), I just "transfer" from the unallocted to the 1000 account to zero it out. Every so often someone will write "Camp Fund" or something on their check, in which case it goes into the group where camp fund would be..

Hope that makes some sense.. I just want to keep things simple, and be able to produce monthly and an annual report that is easy to understand and kind of relates to the way we've been doing it since the congregation will understand that. We don't do a budget, nor a balance sheet (so we don't show anywhere what the land is worth, building, etc.. we have no mortgage, no vehicles, etc.. just like i said, contributions in and bills and expenses for supplies/etc out).

thanks for any assistance.

Let me see if I can make this clearer to perhaps get some responses. The main thing I don't want to lose is the "appearance" of multiple buckets/fund on the monthly report. So lets say in a month we get in $4000 (1k week for illustration purposes). In reality, it goes to a single checking account. On the monthly report though, we "move" $1k to the "Commended Workers" account, and 1K to the "Building and Grounds" account. So on the monthly report people see 2K going to the "unallocated" account, and 1K to each of the others. On our chart of accounts, building and grounds is the 7000 range. If that month I write a check for something in say 7010 - Lawn Care for $500, the monthly report would show the $1000 "transfer" to the building and grounds group, the 500 expense, and then show that building and grounds has $500 "left". Is that type of setup possible, or should I scrap that and just get people used to the the program will report it.. I don't want people getting bogged down with debits/credits here and there, and all the accounting terminilogy and lingo..

That any help? i can post the excel spreadsheet of one of our monthly reports if that would help?

I guess the basic confusion for me is what do I make "contribution funds", and then in Accounting, what do i set up as accounts/funds there?

I'm still not totally clear on how you are using "buckets" to account for your income and expenses. It would be helpful to see a sample of your current monthly report. You may want to have an accountant look at your current process and advise you on how to set up your accounting in PC+ so that the reports PC+ produces look as close to your current reports as possible.

I can't attach an actual Excel file (I will try and thrown one up on my webspace later, but I can't do that from work, so here's the general idea. Now I am not against totally scrapping this and going with a more "proper accounting way" of doing it if that's what you suggest.

I'll just use 2 Sundays as an example. In our chapel, the 1st Sunday offerings all go to support our commended workers, so this sounds like one of the "restricted" fund?

On the 1st Sunday, lets say we get 5 contributions totalling $500

Person 1 $100
Person 2 $100
Person 3 $100
Person 4 $100
Person 5 $100

On the 2nd sunday, we get:

Person 1 $100
Person 2 $200 (Camp Fund)
Person 6 $100
Person 7 $100

Total $500, with $200 'earmarked' for the Camp Fund.

In that month, we have a few expenses. 1st number is our "GL account #" for lack of a better term

5140 Garbage Disposal $50
5105 Electicity $100
1375 Speakers $50

On the GL, Heading 5000 is "Operations and Maintenance", and 1000 is "Ministry".

On the monthly report I do, I would have this:
So what that shows in the 1st column "Master Acct" is our actual rcpts, expense and final balance. Basically that's what in the bank. The other columns correspond to the headings on the GL, and you'll see we "transfer" money to them to pay the expenses. The 1st sunday goes right into the "1000 bucket", and since we wrote $150 in checks for expense in the "5000 O&M" bucket, we transfer 150 from the "not allocated" to make the O&M 0. If the 5000 starting balance wasn't 0 we would only transfer what was necessary, if any at all.

So again, I am not against starting from scratch... just need to know what I set up as funds in the contribution module, and what as accounts/etc in GL. And do any need to be restricted?

Thanks.. sorry if its hard to understand or doesn' tmake sense. It's what I inherited, and it works fine but is tedious to do each month with multiple spreadsheets and such. And then the annual report - ugh.. consolidating the data from 12 spreadsheets (each with a few worksheets in it) is not fun!

Thank you for the example. This helped me to understand much better how your current process is working.

Your "Buckets" appear to really be budget categories of expenses and your "Master Account" is your checking account. I believe that what you will want to do is set up expense account groupings on your chart of accounts for each "bucket". Then for each specific expense account you will want to set up a budgeted amount. You can then run an Income and Expense Statement in PC+ that will compare budgeted and actual expenses. From what you are describing using PC+ will save you a lot of time in preparing reports compared to what you are doing now. Setting up expense account groupings and budgets in PC+ would probably also eliminate the need for you to transfer receipts to the different buckets as you are currently doing.

One question that needs to be answered is whether it's really required that the total checking account balance be broken out by "bucket" as you are currently doing. This can be done in PC+ but would require either setting up a separate accounting fund for each bucket or setting up restricted accounts. Given the size of your church I would recommend that you try to avoid doing this, as it will make your accounting processes more complicated than they probably really need to be.

The "Master Account" will be accounted for in PC+ via the account you set up for the checking account. You can run several reports in PC+ on this account that will show you how much cash was received and spent.

There's likely more details that need to be addressed in setting up your chart of accounts that are beyond the scope of this forum. You will probably need an Accountant or someone with some accounting background to help you set up your chart of accounts in such a way so that the reports that come from PC+ look similar to the ones that you are now producing. Some of your current GL account numbers will need to be changed i.e. in PC+ you can't have expense accounts that begin with "1" like you currently do in your "1000" bucket.