Church Retreats

[whfpc]

Soooo, another aha question moment...... We have an annual All Church Retreat in which we pay a deposit on and the church members pay as they can. We have a separate fund 02-4206-206 account for this particular fund. When we receive the payment we have been inputting this as a contribution (since the departure of the last Director of Finance in May), as we are receiving payments now I have noticed they may have been entered as a transaction and not a contribution (because we cannot find any deposit contribution reports on said retreat). Which way is correct?

Robin

[NeilZ]

Soooo, another aha question moment...... We have an annual All Church Retreat in which we pay a deposit on and the church members pay as they can. We have a separate fund 02-4206-206 account for this particular fund. When we receive the payment we have been inputting this as a contribution (since the departure of the last Director of Finance in May), as we are receiving payments now I have noticed they may have been entered as a transaction and not a contribution (because we cannot find any deposit contribution reports on said retreat). Which way is correct?

Robin

FWIW ... you can add as a contribution, however, the Contribution Fund should point to the 02 Accounting Fund, and SHOULD NOT be shown on any Contribution Statement as they are paying to attend something.

Doing it as a transaction through Funds Accounting is also NOT a good idea, as you really don't have any way to pull up a report to find out who paid, all you see is the deposit transaction, and unless someone enters the information in the notes area of the transaction, you lose all accountability.

My advice is to use Accounts Receivable. If you have v12 its much easier to use AR than before as it will allow you to copy from the Membership Database.

In this way you have an invoice setup for each person attending the retreat, say at a cost of $120.00. Every time they pay toward the bill, the funds are entered through AR, and they can get issued a receipt showing the amount paid, and the balance. This also gives you a way to track who has paid in full, what a person's balance is remaining, or who have not paid at all.

You can do this through Contributions too, but you'd have to setup a pledge for each person to the retreat fund. However, you really couldn't use a regular 'Contribution Statement' to show their balance on the 'pledge'. You would only be able to have this retreat fund on the statement; and you'd have to change the usual text used "the given only received intangible benefits, etc), to something like, the amount shown was given toward a tangible benefit (church retreat) and cannot be used for tax deduction purposes.

[whfpc]

Digging deeper it appears that in the past all "donations" for trips, mom program etc have been entered as transactions and not contributions, since the previous person left they started entering them as contributions, is this messing up our contributions? It is being debited from the checking and crediting to the proper account. They have not used AR so that's something I will have to look into later but right now I am over my head.

Robin

[NeilZ]

Digging deeper it appears that in the past all "donations" for trips, mom program etc have been entered as transactions and not contributions, since the previous person left they started entering them as contributions, is this messing up our contributions? It is being debited from the checking and crediting to the proper account. They have not used AR so that's something I will have to look into later but right now I am over my head.

Robin

Its not a problem if its pointing to the correct fund, as you said above. The only thing is to make sure that you check that the checkbox for Include fund on statements is NOT checked for that Fund in the Maintain List of Contribution Funds function.

This is not something they can take a deduction for, so it should not show up on any statement.

[whfpc]

It is NOT checked ..... So what is the best practice (other than AR) to enter these? As contributions or transactions?

Robin

[NeilZ]

It is NOT checked ..... So what is the best practice (other than AR) to enter these? As contributions or transactions?

Robin

Oh, I thought I had said above, doing it as transactions through Funds Accounting is never a good idea when you have to track the payment or donation. If you don't want to setup AR, then Contributions is the next best thing. As the checkbox is not checked, you're good to go.

[whfpc]

You did say it's not a good idea, sorry I should have re-read. Thanks for your help in clearing things up.