User Support Forum

We use Designations with all our Funds, for example, Regular Offering and Plate Offering are separate designations under Tithes and Offerings. Our normal procedure is to sort our envelopes and other giving and enter everything with the same Fund/Designation at one time before moving on to another Fund/Designation. This has worked well with the Enter Contributions screen up until this past Sunday. Suddenly, every time we switch to a new Envelope Number, the Designation drop-down switches back to None. Having to reset it for every entry really slows things down.

We are using Power Church Plus V. 11.55, and we only use the Contributions module, not Accounting. We have been entering things this way without problems for 3 years, and as far as I know nothing has changed in our system since last week. Any ideas what might cause the Designation entry to reset to None on every entry?

Cliff Cullum

UMCSOFinSec wrote:We use Designations with all our Funds, for example, Regular Offering and Plate Offering are separate designations under Tithes and Offerings. Our normal procedure is to sort our envelopes and other giving and enter everything with the same Fund/Designation at one time before moving on to another Fund/Designation. This has worked well with the Enter Contributions screen up until this past Sunday. Suddenly, every time we switch to a new Envelope Number, the Designation drop-down switches back to None. Having to reset it for every entry really slows things down.

We are using Power Church Plus V. 11.55, and we only use the Contributions module, not Accounting. We have been entering things this way without problems for 3 years, and as far as I know nothing has changed in our system since last week. Any ideas what might cause the Designation entry to reset to None on every entry?

Cliff Cullum

Evidently, this was a long time bug that was never addressed as the last Maintenance Release fixed this to always reset the designation. The way it was affected the majority of users who just entered envelopes as they were opened and entered, and assigned designations on an as needed basis (usually temporary) not a permanent setting. FWIW .. the bug often caught me when entering on Sundays, and I often had to go back to remove the designations later.

The designation function was always designed to designate specific donations within a fund, in order to keep from having to create multiple Contribution Funds to track items.

For example, you have a Contribution Fund called Memorials, this would collect any donations in honor of members or friends who have passed. In order to track how much was donated in honor/memory of someone you'd create a designation, usually setup for a specific period of time.

Same for tithes and offerings, if you had a specific designation for a collection that was to be used in house, instead of creating a separate fund, you'd create a designation.

That said in your case, using designations to separate regular offerings (I'm assuming from member's envelopes) from plate offerings (loose bills/change, pew envelopes) is overkill. If you have a pew envelope with a name and address, you would enter that info, and give then an envelope number outside the normal range of envelopes, this way if someone gave the same way next week, you have an envelope number you can use, then send them a statement at the end of the year. If it was loose offerings, its suggested that you create a 'member' called Loose Cash, and give it a number of 999 or 9999 and assign those contributions there.

Ahh! Your "bug" was my "feature".

On the overkill, there are a couple of other designations we use under Tithes and Offerings as well, and in other accounts such as Reserve Funds and Missions we have large numbers of designations so we can track individual categories while totaling the amounts into the broader fund categories. In essence, we use designations as sub-accounts to match the account structure we use in Quick Books. That said, you are right in that it is overkill in the case of regular offerings which are the only situation where we need to enter 50 or 60 of them each Sunday. I'll separate our regular offerings in to their own account, and put the other things we had there somewhere else. We can live with the reset on everything else because we rarely have to enter more than a half-dozen or so entries in any other designation on a given Sunday.

That said, what DO you do about sub-accounts? Do you just not use them, or is there some way to set things up that we've missed?


Cliff Cullum

UMCSOFinSec wrote:Ahh! Your "bug" was my "feature".

On the overkill, there are a couple of other designations we use under Tithes and Offerings as well, and in other accounts such as Reserve Funds and Missions we have large numbers of designations so we can track individual categories while totaling the amounts into the broader fund categories. In essence, we use designations as sub-accounts to match the account structure we use in Quick Books. That said, you are right in that it is overkill in the case of regular offerings which are the only situation where we need to enter 50 or 60 of them each Sunday. I'll separate our regular offerings in to their own account, and put the other things we had there somewhere else. We can live with the reset on everything else because we rarely have to enter more than a half-dozen or so entries in any other designation on a given Sunday.

That said, what DO you do about sub-accounts? Do you just not use them, or is there some way to set things up that we've missed?


Cliff Cullum

Because we use Powerchurch for our accounting too, we have everything tied in to that. Quicken subaccounts are basically 5 & 6 level accounts in Powerchurch. Each Ministry has a 3 level account header, and all other expenses fall under that as 5 & 6 level accounts.

We have separate Accounting Funds for areas such as Mission, Building, and Deacons, but all attached to one checking account, the system tracks that internally.

So instead of having a 'designation' for missions from tithes & offerings, the Mission Accounting fund updated the Mission Fund Tithes and Offerings, so that income is seen and tracked separately. Because Quicken is really not setup to do Fund Accounting, you don't have that capability to separate out income into different 'funds' unless you have separate checking accounts, which then opens a new can of worms.

I agree Quicken is easy to use as you don't have to worry about double entry, but Powerchurch is as easy once you get the hang of it.

Not sure if that helped any.