User Support Forum

We have been using PowerChurch for a year now but I am still just scratching the surface of what it can do. We are using version 11.1.

I have some questions regarding working with the equity accounts. We are a relatively small church and we set PowerChurch up with just a single Fund. We only have 1 chequing account that all our money flows through. We have several 'departments' that we want to keep track of funds that are donated specifically to (ie. Youth Group). I set up several 32xx accounts, one for each department that we want to track. I also have a corresponding 42xx income account for each one. My goal is to be able to track how much money has been designated to each department. I have checked and each 42xx income account and any related expense accounts are set to close to the 32xx Fund Balance account so I think I have that set up right. I did just realize though that last year I had missed setting the income and expense account to close to the proper Fund Balance account so everything had closed to the unrestricted general account. I don't know if that can be changed and/or if that will mess things up enormously or not.

My problem is that I have been unable to find a report that shows me this information. Using the Youth Group example, say that $1000.00 has been donated specifically for them, then they had a fundraiser and raised $500.00. If the youth pastor comes to me and says how much money do we have right now, what report can I print out that will show that there is $1500.00 currently in the Youth Group 32xx Fund Balance account?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You probably don't want multiple equity accounts for what you are trying to do. Multiple equity accounts are mostly for separating out UNRESTRICTED, TEMPORARILY RESTRICTED, and PERMANENTLY RESTRICTED monies, as opposed to youth ministry, Sunday school, etc.

What you want is a GROUP INCOME account (in the 4000 range) for Youth Ministries, and Detail line items under that pertaining to youth income. Then, make a GROUP EXPENSE account (in the 5000-8000 range) for Youth Ministries, and detail your expense line items under that.

You can assign budget expenses, for example, to the Youth expenses.

Let's say you budgeted $800.00 for Youth expenses, and you have income of $1000, and expenses of $500.00, and your pastor asks you how much money is left for youth.

Run a Budget Report, or an Income and Expense Report with "yearly budget" as one of the columns.

You will see $1000.00 in youth income at the top of the report.
You will see $500.00 spent out of an $800.00 line item budget.

You add $1000.00 plus $800.00 minus $500.00 equals $1,300.00 left to spend for youth.

There is no way to get the income and expenses together in this type of accounting software. That is one thing you will just have to get used to.

If you want to keep track of each department separately, why not just set up a different fund for each department? This way you keep track of the income and expense and budgets for each department. When you run reports you specify to run the report for just that fund or you can run the report for all funds to get a consolidated report.

Brian

Brian Reid wrote:If you want to keep track of each department separately, why not just set up a different fund for each department? This way you keep track of the income and expense and budgets for each department. When you run reports you specify to run the report for just that fund or you can run the report for all funds to get a consolidated report.

Brian

That would create many funds each one having to track checking/equity/income/expense. They were not designed for such a use.

Funds were designed to track money that are for specific general areas of the church:

Operations, Building (construction/maintenance), Missions and so on.

Under each area you may have ministries with an expense account.

For instance, the Facilities ministry may have expense accounts for supplies, small cleaning equipment and janitorial salary/service under Operations, but they would also have income and expense accounts under Building to track income to the construction/maintenance account, and expenses for builder/repairs.