Developing an accounting module would, in many ways, be like re-inventing the wheel for us....as there are many very good accounting products already on the market - QuickBooks and Peachtree, just to name a couple. These and other companies have spent decades (and many millions of dollars) developing easy-to-use and robust accounting systems. However, there are very few companies that have focused on producing quality, easy-to-use, yet powerful church-specific ministry-empowering software as we have done here at Helpmate.

Based on our recent customer surveys, our customers are very satisfied with utilizing our Church Helpmate system in conjunction with their accounting software. This is most likely because there really is very little data that must pass from Church Helpmate to their accounting system each week.  And there is never any double-entry or double-maintenance of data between the 2 systems.

Please allow us to explain....

Let's suppose that you have a collection of contributions that have been received from the congregation. The first thing you would do is enter the "batch" of contributions into the Church Helpmate database.  You'd be entering all of the specific details here in Church Helpmate,...such as the Smith family contributed $100 towards the Building Fund. Church Helpmate is able to generate many contributor-type reports, as well IRS-approved contribution statements designed to send to the contributors (by postal mail or by email) for their income tax return purposes.

When you are done with entering all of these details about "who gave how much, to which fund", the next logical step is to now take this money and deposit it into your bank account. That's where your accounting package comes into the picture. What you would need to know in your accounting system is obviously the total amount of the contribution "batch" (ie. the total amount received).   You would also need to know how much was contributed towards each "fund" (for example, the General Fund, Building Fund, Missions Fund, etc.). These "fund totals" are important to know in your accounting system so that you can keep a running "balance" of what has been received towards each fund/purpose.

While you would need the batch total amount and the fund totals in your accounting system, you would NOT need to store each specific contributor's details in your accounting system.  You would have the details that the Smith family contributed $100 towards the Building Fund on Nov 20th in Church Helpmate.....but in your accounting system you'd simply have a deposit figure representing the total amount deposited towards the Building Fund. In this way, you would NOT have any contributor's identities in your accounting package....there would be no need for this.

So really every week (or every deposit period), you would have to enter into your accounting system simply the fund total amounts. The number of fund totals here would be equal to the number of distinct funds that people have contributed to.  For example, if you have a collection of contributions in which 100 people have contributed to 5 different funds, you would have 100 entries in Church Helpmate (representing each individual contribution), and only 5 entries in your accounting package (representing each of the fund totals).

For our customers that use QuickBooks, Peachtree, and other popular accounting systems, Church Helpmate can generate a file that can be imported into the accounting package. This import process automatically creates a deposit transaction in the accounting software with the fund total details. This export/import process can be helpful if you have a large number of funds that people give towards....but is certainly not necessary.

To learn more about Church Helpmate, click here