At first glance this may seem like a
disadvantage, however, we have intentionally chosen NOT to include an accounting
module into our system. Instead, we have chosen to focus our efforts on
designing the "best of breed" church membership management
system - covering the membership & visitor management,
group/activity/ministry/interest management, contributions & pledges
management, meetings & attendance management, visitations management,
and church health analysis....essentially all of the church-specific
elements.
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.
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