User Support Forum

I am reading the manual and am actively reading this forum but I am wanting to put a scenario out there to determine exactly how to do something.
My church has started a weekly ALPHA class on wednesday nights. We have had to purchase books and supplies, we either have the meal catered or reimburse members for the expense and we also have a collection taken on the night of class to just cover expenses.

My questions is, what is the best way to track all of this activity so that if we wanted to know how much APLHA is costing us and how much has been contributed to the class, we could run a report and see the numbers.

I am new to all of this and we are a new church so please be patient as the learning curve can be overwhelming

pcu55303 wrote:I am reading the manual and am actively reading this forum but I am wanting to put a scenario out there to determine exactly how to do something.
My church has started a weekly ALPHA class on wednesday nights. We have had to purchase books and supplies, we either have the meal catered or reimburse members for the expense and we also have a collection taken on the night of class to just cover expenses.

My questions is, what is the best way to track all of this activity so that if we wanted to know how much APLHA is costing us and how much has been contributed to the class, we could run a report and see the numbers.

I am new to all of this and we are a new church so please be patient as the learning curve can be overwhelming

I also ran Alpha at the last church I was at. Alpha had a budgeted account under Evangelism, thus all spending was shown out of that account. However, all money that came in from the free will donations was then put back into that account (don't ask me what is debited or credited, I'm not an accountant ) so the end result was that if we started with a $500 budget, spent $350, but collected $150 over the length of the course, the account would show an actual spending of $200.

If you want to show actual contributions, you could create a special Contribution Fund outside of the deductible funds range (or in v11 set it up as a non-deductible fund), set it up as debiting the bank account (to account for the money), and crediting the Alpha account (to offset the spending).

John Meyer may have another take on this, but with the contribution fund setup, and using the Loose Cash envelope number, you can then have a report showing the money coming in from Alpha.

FWIW ... when I did Alpha, the participant guides were free, any extra books sold were at cost, and meals were a free will offering toward the food. I highly encourage the mention of the offering toward food, it does help to offset some of the costs.

The bottom line on Alpha however, is how many can you bring to Christ.

So ...

Books ... $75.00
Food ... $125.00
People brought to Christ, Priceless !!

You could set up an income account with a subaccount number range like 01-4610-770 Alpha Food income, 01-4610-771, Alpha book income, etc.

Then set up expenses like 01-5243-770 Alpha Food expense, 01-5244-771 Alpha book expenses, etc.

Then run an income and expense report like this:

Fund 01 to 01
Accounts: 4000 through 5999
Subaccounts 770 through 779

and I think will only pull up your Alpha information.

Have not tried it.

JohnDMeyers wrote:You could set up an income account with a subaccount number range like 01-4610-770 Alpha Food income, 01-4610-771, Alpha book income, etc.

Then set up expenses like 01-5243-770 Alpha Food expense, 01-5244-771 Alpha book expenses, etc.

Then run an income and expense report like this:

Fund 01 to 01
Accounts: 4000 through 5999
Subaccounts 770 through 779

and I think will only pull up your Alpha information.

Have not tried it.

Noting John's disclaimer at the end....
If there *is* a way to do what John has described, I would like to know how. From what I see in the Income-Expense report dialogue the only item you can filter on is the *fund* but *not* on account or subaccount level. Sure wish we could! I've wanted to do that very thing on several occasions. I suppose that's where custom reports come in, but I have not yet geared up the courage to take that on....

That said, would it be possible to use the Account Activity report to pull out the information that is wanted in the original post?

Eden

Thanks, Eden.

This is one of those, "gotta hurry and get to the kids basketball game". I should have taken the time to check the report form.

There is a subaccount report. Not sure if the information is as useful, but it's one more thing to try.