Using Quickbooks to Track Various Funds

by Cheryl Megosh
(San Antonio, TX)

We use Quickbooks to manage the Church budget but within the budget we have line items for various ministries and each of those could have a fundraiser to supplement their budget item.

Is there a way in Quickbooks that you know of to allocate the appropriate percentage of the offering to the different funds and have it show as an available balance and still monitor what was expended and have a running balance for each fund?

Answer

I’m not sure how you have your file set up. If you have the class tracking on and have set up your different funds set up as classes, you would simply assign each transaction to its proper class (fund).

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

To get a running balance for each fund you would simply run a Profit and Loss by Class Report. You can memorize this report and name it what you want.

You might want to look at a pretty good resource book called: Running QuickBooks in Nonprofits: The Only Comprehensive Guide for Nonprofits Using QuickBooks. It was written in 2005 so some things have changed in QBs and a lot of the book pertains to nonprofit grants and income; however, it does have some very helpful tips on setting up and maintaining Quickbooks for a church. It also has a whole chapter on Quickbooks Fundraising Tools.

Hope this helps,



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