Accounting for church building fund

1. What is the accounting entry to record cash received for church building fund?
2. Is this fund reported as income in the income statement?

Comments for Accounting for church building fund

Click here to add your own comments

Aug 21, 2019

Accounting for Donations
by: Vickey

I will answer your second question first. Yes. all donations should be recorded as "revenue" and show in the Statement of Activity (Income Statement).

Now onto the first question... how you record the "restricted" donation would depend on your accounting software and how you have it set up.

I track "restricted" monies in QuickBooks Online by using classes, locations, projects, or donors (if I am not using QBO to track individual donors). Which one or combination I use depends on my individual clients, but probably the easiest way for a church that is not tracking categories for 990 reporting is setting up classes to track what restricted donations come in and show how that restricted monies was spent.

Aplos is easier. I would set up the Building Fund and then record donation on a "Restricted Donations" income account and assign that fund to it. I could even go further and track specific building campaigns with Aplos tag feature.

If you are recording in a paper general ledger, you could debit Cash and credit a "Building Donations" income account.

See more on basic accounting in my Church Accounting Package. Click on "Packages" in the top navigation links and then the Church Accounting Package.

Click here to add your own comments

Join in and write your own page! It's easy to do. How? Simply click here to return to Accounting.

If you want to DIY your payroll, I highly recommend you look at using Gusto! It is very user friendly and their support is awesome! Plus they know how to set up and maintain payrolls for churches and nonprofit organizations.

Note: I am a "partner" of Gusto, but as I have told you before ... I never recommend anything that we or our clients have not tried and love =)

Share this page:

What’s this?

Facebook

Enjoy this page? Please pay it forward. Here's how...

Would you prefer to share this page with others by linking to it?

Click on the HTML link code below.
Copy and paste it, adding a note of your own, into your blog, a Web page, forums, a blog comment, your Facebook account, or anywhere that someone would find this page valuable.