Contributions posted to wrong date

[Margaret]

Help! My church only uses PowerChurch to track contibutions. We have a new person posting the contibutions and the contributions for Feb. 10th were all posted to Feb. 17th. Is there any "quick and easy" way to correct a date error?

I know that you can correct a posting error by entering the same amount as a "deduct." This "zeros" out the error. Then, you enter the correction. But I hate to do that with the collection for an entire Sunday. I'm out of town on business all week. So, I can't access the PowerChurch book. I'm hoping that someone has another solution to fix this error. Thanks in advance for any help we can get!

Margaret

[NeilZ]

Help! My church only uses PowerChurch to track contibutions. We have a new person posting the contibutions and the contributions for Feb. 10th were all posted to Feb. 17th. Is there any "quick and easy" way to correct a date error?

I know that you can correct a posting error by entering the same amount as a "deduct." This "zeros" out the error. Then, you enter the correction. But I hate to do that with the collection for an entire Sunday. I'm out of town on business all week. So, I can't access the PowerChurch book. I'm hoping that someone has another solution to fix this error. Thanks in advance for any help we can get!

Margaret

I suspect that any contributions for Feb 17 were properly posted as Feb 17th. So no, there's no 'easy' way to do this. What version of Powerchurch are you using? version 11.x now allows you to reverse contributions instead of having to enter a negative contribution.

Are you at least using Powerchurch for membership tracking also ?? If not, you're maintaining two separate databases which can also cause you trouble.

[Margaret]

Neil,

We're using PowerChurch Version 10. I believe that you're correct that the contributions were correctly entered - simply put on the wrong date. And I unfortunately thought the correction might not be the easy. And by the way, we have the program for our contributions on a "stand alone" laptop which is not part of our network.

And as you noted, we do use PowerChurch for attendance but on a different computer. While I can agree with your comment on 2 daatabases, our Membership Committee doesn't want the contribution data co-mingled. Finally, we use QuickBooks for Non-Profits for our accounting.

Thanks for the reply. Maybe someone else has an idea.

Margaret

[NeilZ]

Neil,

We're using PowerChurch Version 10. I believe that you're correct that the contributions were correctly entered - simply put on the wrong date. And I unfortunately thought the correction might not be the easy. And by the way, we have the program for our contributions on a "stand alone" laptop which is not part of our network.

And as you noted, we do use PowerChurch for attendance but on a different computer. While I can agree with your comment on 2 daatabases, our Membership Committee doesn't want the contribution data co-mingled. Finally, we use QuickBooks for Non-Profits for our accounting.

Thanks for the reply. Maybe someone else has an idea.

Margaret

FWIW ... the Membership Committee is being very parochial. With two separate databases, you run the risk of one being up to date with addresses and contact information, and the other completely wrong.

[Margaret]

Neil,

I don't totally disagree. However, this has "gone on" for years. (It pre-dates my involvement as Chair of Stewardship.) And if you attempt to use the backup/restore feature to combine the files, the database from one will "overwrite" the other. We tried this a couple of years ago. So, we'll likely leave it alone until we dicide to change it ALL!

Thanks,
Margaret Merhoff
Northkirk Presbyterian

[Zaina]

Basically, there isn't an easy way to do this.

You can either reverse out all of the contributions entered to Feb. 17 that should have been Feb. 10 and reenter them with the correct date. The reversing process in version 10 is to go to the Enter Contributions screen, enter the contribution exactly like it was the first time but with a negative amount. You would post these and then reenter them for the 10th.

Or you could choose to delete the date of Feb 17 taking everything out and then reenter both days. It would depend on which way you thought was faster.

If you have a backup made before posting, you could restore that. However that option also will remove any entries made after that date.

[Margaret]

Zaina,

Thank you so much! I had not even thought of "deleting" Feb. 17th. That is a definitely easier way to correct this error. I can envision our secretary inputting the negative numbers and making even more errors! Again thank you!

Margaret Merhoff

[NeilZ]

Zaina,

Thank you so much! I had not even thought of "deleting" Feb. 17th. That is a definitely easier way to correct this error. I can envision our secretary inputting the negative numbers and making even more errors! Again thank you!

Margaret Merhoff

I'd definitely due a backup, and print out a listing of all donations for that day before doing any deletions

[Zaina]

Absolutely Neil! I neglected to mention that, sorry. Backups are ALWAYS a good thing to have.