Quickbooks User.

Question regarding QuickBooks:

Hello, I'm the bookkeeper for a local church in Rogersville, MO. I've been reading your site and it's given me several tips for my job. I have a couple of questions.

We use QB and I'm trying to learn all of the capabilities that it has. Can you enter your contributions into QB and keep track of them there instead of Membership Plus? Also, you mentioned setting up the accounts with class tracking or setting up our fund accounts w/equity acct. Not sure what that means. Our Pastor wants to simplify our reports and so I'm starting a new company and setting everything back up from square one.

One more question, we want to keep track of our Funds, i.e. Women's ministries, and have a running tally of the debits and credits and a balance at the end of the mo. I've heard the only way to do that is set it up as a liability. Any better solutions?

Thank you so much for your help!!

Maria Lopez
Bookkeeper
Rogersville Assembly of God

Answer

Alright, simplest way to set it up is with classes. Go to Edit, Preferences, on left side of window...click Accounting...now click Company tab. Click little boxes next to ”use class tracking” and ”prompt to assign classes”.

Now go to List, Class List...in the little window that pops up...click on classes and then New to set up your funds.

Some people set up 3 classes for income: Unrestricted, Temporary Restricted, and Permanently Restricted...then set up individual funds as subclasses under the proper class. Just be sure to allocate each funds individual expenses to the proper subclass.

Some people set up their fund balances as liabilities, but I would not recommend doing that in Quickbooks as it would be hard to run reports on.

To get a running balance for each fund set up as income and expenses...you would simply run a Profit and Loss by Class Report. You can memorize this report and name it whatever you want.


As far as keeping track of contributions, enter each member as a customer. To record their donations, go to Customers...Enter Sales Receipts to open the Sales Receipt window and fill out.

You could then print out the receipt for individual donations or for those who give regular offerings...you could run a Sales by Customer Detail Report and attach it your annual contribution letter so that your contributors would have a receipt for their individual donations for the year.

You might want to consider purchasing Running QuickBooks in Nonprofits: The Only Comprehensive Guide for Nonprofits Using QuickBooks. It was written in 2005 so some things are different in the new QB and a lot of it pertains to nonprofit revenue such as grants; however, it still contains some great information for setting up and maintaining QB for a church.

Hope this helps,




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