Need Advice: Restart or Reassign?

[CLCRenee]

Our church has been using PC+ for several years now, and our chart of accounts is a mess! I've been there for a little over a year, and I've been exporting our Trial Balance to Excel and reorganizing everything there. However, I'm realizing now that "the way we've always organized our reports" isn't necessarily the right way. Also, I've been reading through the forums, and I'm convinced that PC+ could do everything I'm doing, if I could only get everything organized correctly. Here's the big question: If I need to reorganize approximately 600 accounts spread across 19 funds, would it be easier to restart accounting or to reorganize by reassigning/moving accounts? My guess is that I would have to make changes to 75% of what exists.

If I restart: We've just reached the end of our fiscal year, so I could back up what we have and run it stand-alone when necessary. I would probably enter my payroll on the archived version as well, since we're so close to the end of the calendar year, and that would make year-end reporting easy.

If I reorganize: What's the downside, aside from the time factor?

Again, I can simply restructure my spreadsheets, but I think I'd like to have it done correctly.

Thanks much for any input.

[Matt]

Given the scenario you describe it will likely be quicker and less complicated to restart Fund Accounting so you can reconfigure your chart of accounts from scratch. The big disadvantage of restarting accounting though is that you lose all of the accounting history in the AP, Payroll, AR, and Fund Accounting modules. Another disadvantage is that unless you prepare an account crosswalk it will be hard to compare accounting reports between the two systems. One thing you might want to also take a look at no matter whether you restart or reorganize the existing accounts is whether you really need ~600 accounts and 19 accounting funds. Depending on how your church needs to do it's reporting you may be able to reduce the number of funds (and possibly accounts) by setting up restricted equity accounts and using the restricted funds capabilities of the system.

[CLCRenee]

We DON'T need all those accounts and funds. It just happened that a specific detail account was set up for every eventuality through the years. I'll be paring them down substantially.

I'm already building my new chart in Excel, and I'll be using a lookup for comparison between old and new.

Thanks for the input.

Just to confirm, though, an accounting restart does not touch the detail in Contributions - only the Fund Accounting postings?

[Matt]

That is correct. The restart accounting only affects the data in the Fund Accounting modules.