Best Practice for adding donor organizations?

[BBS]

What is the best way to handle maintaining the donation records of organizations or churches that donate (i.e., not individuals)?

Should the name be added all in the "Last Name" field (not many characters are allowed)?

Or should we put part of the name in the First Name field and part in the Last Name field?

I entered one church in to try it. At first I put something like "New Hope" in the first name field and "Church" in the last name field. But then PowerChurch sorts by last name and presents it as "Church, New Hope". I also added a family member which had the same data. I did that because I thought there had to be one "family member" associated with each "family". But I'm not too sure I'm doing this correctly.

Thanks for your advice!

[NeilZ]

What is the best way to handle maintaining the donation records of organizations or churches that donate (i.e., not individuals)?

Should the name be added all in the "Last Name" field (not many characters are allowed)?

Or should we put part of the name in the First Name field and part in the Last Name field?

I entered one church in to try it. At first I put something like "New Hope" in the first name field and "Church" in the last name field. But then PowerChurch sorts by last name and presents it as "Church, New Hope". I also added a family member which had the same data. I did that because I thought there had to be one "family member" associated with each "family". But I'm not too sure I'm doing this correctly.

Thanks for your advice!

As you realized, Powerchurch usually sorts by last name. its reasonable considering its basically built for a congregation consisting of families.

However, I used PCPlus to track the finances of the Presbytery where I was the treasurer. Each church was required to provide funds to the presbytery to cover costs, as well as to provide for the various ministries it supported.

As each organization was a 'presbyterian church' I just used the name of the church as the Last Name and kept the first name blank (unless there were duplicate names). I also used the same name for the Personal Profile, which is needed as that's what the envelope or contributor number is connected to.

So I had the following (names are fictitious):

Last Name (First Name)
Baltimore Evangelical
Bethany
Bethel (Tampa)
Bethel (Lake City)
Covenant (Dallas)
Covenant (El Paso)
First (Brooklyn)
First (Manhatten)
First (Albany)

and so on.

Does this help?

[BBS]

Yes, that does help, Neil.

What I've decided I *think* will work is to use "Church" as the last name for all churches. The fields in PowerChurch are so small that a full name of a church/organization won't fit in either the First Name or Last Name fields.

Thank you!