accounting funds

[mocat]

how do you decide when it is better to add more funds instead of 1
we set up contribution funds for several different things
each mission
womens reimbursements
softball etc. should we have set up a fund for each and should we set up a fund
for sales tax refunds or just keep everything in general fund

[NeilZ]

how do you decide when it is better to add more funds instead of 1
we set up contribution funds for several different things
each mission
womens reimbursements
softball etc. should we have set up a fund for each and should we set up a fund
for sales tax refunds or just keep everything in general fund

Just a quick note for the future, the forum is setup with categories corresponding to areas within Powerchurch, as a Contributions question, this would have been better asked in that area.

That said,

You're talking apples and oranges here. You can setup as many Contribution funds as you want, for whatever purpose you want. Depending on your church finances, you may need only ONE Funds Accounting Fund. Under that fund you can setup accounts for whatever purpose you want, and edit the Contribution Fund to post to the Funds Accounting account and update the checking account.

If you have one checking account, where all your income gets deposited, one Funds Accounting Fund should suffice, with many different types of accounts under that one fund. In fact, one church I know keeps all their checking accounts, endowment investments and income, and other savings accounts under one fund.

Now I suspect someone with more accounting experience will come by with some additional advice.

[JohnDMeyers]

I use this rule-of-thumb:

If an activity has either of these cases: only one income account and a few expense accounts or only one expense account and a few income accounts, it can be part of the General Fund.

If an activity has both numerous income accounts and numerous expense accounts, it should have its own Fund.

So, if you have an activity like softball, you would have one income account called "softball designations" and perhaps mulitple (but not numerous) expense accounts, like "food for softball" and "softball equipment" and "softball field rental", I would keep that in the General Fund.

If you have an activity like a college ministry, where there may be numerous incomes (we have this scenario in our church) like "income for Superbowl Sunday event" and "general donations for college" and "income for new students event" and lots of expense accounts, then you would want to set up a separate "College Fund" parallel to your General Fund.