User Support Forum

Our church has a copy of PowerChurch and I have been assigned to figure out how best to start using it. I would appreciate it if someone can help me by answering some of these questions.

Is there a way to create an accountant copy? How do some of you interact with PowerChurch and your accountants?

Would it make any sense to start using PowerChurch without the accounting module?

Patrick

I can't help you with the accountant questions, but I would definitely start using Powerchurch right away. I helped a friend set up hers. She started with the membership module, then the contribution module. We did accounting last. It is very time consuming, but once everything is in the system, life gets much easier! It's a great program and you can generate about any report you can dream up. Definitely use the accounting module!

By "Accountant Copy" do you mean you want to install this on an Accountant's computer? If so, I think the answer is affirmative. We have ours set up on three computers - The Contribution person's, The Church's, and the Treasurer's home computer. It is VERY important that there be communication between these, so that the same information is kept on all of them. (For example, the Membership lists are important to both the Church Secretary, and the Contributions Recording person). We have backups made by people with administrator privileges, and these get emailed to each other.

Your other question, about which modules to use, depends on your needs. You should ask yourself why the program was purchased - and go from there. We did a one-year test run paralleling our old system, and will be implementing the whole thing in 2008.

abuzenimd wrote:Our church has a copy of PowerChurch and I have been assigned to figure out how best to start using it. I would appreciate it if someone can help me by answering some of these questions.

Is there a way to create an accountant copy? How do some of you interact with PowerChurch and your accountants?

Would it make any sense to start using PowerChurch without the accounting module?

Patrick

If you're talking about an accountant copy in the same way you can create a copy in Quickbooks, there is no way to do that. The alternative, as has been said here, is to have the accountant access Powerchurch.

As was mentioned, you could install Powerchurch on a computer at the accountant's office, or use something like GoToMyPC to give the accountant access to a church computer for their audits.

"Would it make any sense to start using PowerChurch without the accounting module?"

The answer to this question is, of course, yes! Yous should start using PC+ immediately. In fact, here is what we did at our church. We first used the Memebership Module to build the membership list. Then we moved into using the Contribution Module. We still have not used the Accounting Module yet. But we do plan to learn it. It really does get easier after a while.

Clark