PowerChurch Software Newsletter - Summer 2018

Welcome to the Summer 2018 issue of the PowerChurch Software newsletter! In this issue, we cover a new Payroll tax from Oregon state, new Attendance features in Version 12, and a warning for McAfee antivirus software users.

Oregon State Transit Tax

Beginning July 1, 2018, the state of Oregon imposed a Transit Tax. More information can be found here: https://www.oregon.gov/DOR/programs/businesses/Pages/statewide-transit-tax.aspx

This is not to be classified and reported with normal Oregon state income tax. Instead, the only reporting of the amounts deducted for the Transit Tax will likely be as a note in Box 14 on the W2. According to the article linked above, it is not yet a requirement, but they will make a final decision on that at a later time.

To set this item up in PowerChurch, create an "Other Deduction" item on the Maintain Item Descriptions screen found under Accounting > Payroll > Setup. In the Tax Options field, choose "After tax deduction". If you haven't already done so, you will also want to add a new Liability account to track the deducted funds, so that you can pay this out to the state quarterly or yearly as detailed in the article linked above.

You can then add the new deduction item to employees' pay items on the Maintain List of Employees screen under the Pay Items tab. It is calculated as a flat percentage amount, so choose Percent in the Amount/Percent field. The percentage to enter is 0.100% (one tenth of one percent).

At the end of the year, when processing W2s, PowerChurch will recognize that you are in the state of Oregon and will ask which deduction item(s) should be classified as the Transit Tax in Box 14.

Version 12 Highlight - Attendance Fast Data Entry Screen

There were multiple improvements made on the Fast Data Entry screen in Version 12. It allows you to record attendance counts, shows a running count of the number of people present in the activity, and also allows you to enter attendance for multiple activities and/or dates at a time without navigating back through the menus in between each. Below is a video demonstrating these new features.

McAfee Antivirus Users Experiencing Problems After Maintenance Release Installations

Over the last year, we have seen an increasing number of users of McAfee Antivirus software products having problems after installing Maintenance Releases in PowerChurch Plus. What appears to be happening is that McAfee doesn't allow the Maintenance Release installation to complete, so when the updated PowerChurch program tries to overwrite the existing program, the process is aborted, leaving PowerChurch in a non-functional state. Next time you try to run PowerChurch from the desktop icon, Windows can't find the PowerChurch Plus program and deletes the shortcut off the desktop.

Virus scans of PowerChurch Plus and the Maintenance Release installer don't find any threats, so it is unclear why McAfee is behaving in this way. We have been in touch with McAfee's customer service, technical support staff, and developers, trying to communicate this very troubling behavior to them. Eventually, we stopped receiving replies to our inquiries and therefore have never gotten an answer or resolution to this problem.

At this point, in the interest of our users and the continuing development and support of our own software products, we can only advise that users of McAfee products try contacting McAfee directly for support on this issue. As paying customers of theirs, your voices may be harder to ignore!

If that doesn't work, we recommend finding a different antivirus solution - one that is actively supported and is non-destructive to harmless apps on your computer. Note: We have recently had multiple users of Malwarebytes experiencing the same type of problem, so that is another one to look out for, or at least to disable during software installations.

As always, our Technical Support staff is available by phone at (800) 486-1800 if you need help getting the Maintenance Release update installed.

Forum Q&A

The Support Forum on our website is a very active online community of our users and Tech Support staff members. There you can browse through thousands of questions and answers, or post your own.

From General:
Q. I love the fact that you can download your PowerChurch DB into an Access DB. Is there a schema list of what each table is?
A. We haven't ever released the actual schema, but there are Knowledge Base articles that list what general information is stored in each table: https://www.powerchurch.com/support/kb.php?terms=data+files

From Contributions:
Q. Can I change a fund number? I have funds 01, 02, and 03. I would like to have fund 03 be fund 02 - thus resulting in fund 02 being fund 03.
A. Changing the fund number is easy. Just go to Maintain List of Accounting Funds and change the number to what you want and click Save. You will need to change the number of fund 02 to something else, like fund 04, before you can change 03 to 02. Once that's done, you can change fund 04 to 03.

From Membership:
Q. I'm looking for a report of all church members in alphabetical order with the name of their deacon beside the member's name.
A. This is probably more of an export than a formatted report. If you want only name and deacon to be included, use the Export Data option under Membership > Personal Profiles > Other Output. Create a CSV or XLS file and then open it with Excel for further formatting and printing.