Tracking the spending of designated contributions

[mr-chipster]

Newbie question re Designations: how do you track the spending of contributions that were designated. For example, the church raises money to buy bike racks for the church as an outreach to local mountain bikers. Contributions go to the temporarily restricted Outreach Fund with a Bike Rack Designation. As purchases are made and funds are released, how do you know how much of the designated bike rack contributions has been spent?

[NeilZ]

Newbie question re Designations: how do you track the spending of contributions that were designated. For example, the church raises money to buy bike racks for the church as an outreach to local mountain bikers. Contributions go to the temporarily restricted Outreach Fund with a Bike Rack Designation. As purchases are made and funds are released, how do you know how much of the designated bike rack contributions has been spent?

Did you create a designation in Contributions? If so, and you apply that designation to the incoming contributions, you can run a report against that designation. You then have the total given, and you should be purchasing these items from a single vendor, so you know how much you've spent and released. Simple subtraction.

The alternative is to add a subaccount number to the Fund Balance account (01-32xx-001). income (01-42xx-001), release (01-48xx-001). to the expense (01-55xx-001) then you can run a subaccount report to get total income, total remaining, total release, and total spent to date. Just select the areas you want to report on from the subaccount report options screen.

One takes more time setting up but gives you a printed report, the other takes no time, but you have to create a two line report yourself.

As usual, I always advise doing a Powerchurch backup of ACCOUNTING before you make any changes in case the results are not what you expect.