[GNC] Using Gnucash for a church; keeping track of contributions

[Greg Feneis]

Perhaps you could use GnuCash's business elements, where you can set up
customers and jobs, and receive payments for various jobs.  I'm thinking
for your church, the church would be the customer, and you could set up
various church projects as jobs.  Church budget could be one job, a
particular mission could be another job, a special project could be thought
of as another job.  When a payment is received, the bookkeeper generates an
invoice against what job (church project) the payment is for and be sure to
make the line item(s)' descriptions in the invoice "donation", then
immediately use GnuCash's pay invoice function to record the receipt of the
money.  If the church is a non-profit organization, perhaps print the
invoice, mark it paid and mail it to the donor in case they track their
donations for tax purposes.

The issue with this is that it's a little tricky to apply a single check
payment to multiple jobs.  I've read about this being an issue in the
recent past.

I'm not an accountant and this is not professional accounting advice.  Just
an idea of a direction you could take.




Kind regards,

Greg Feneis




On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 6:37 AM Eric H. Bowen via gnucash-user <
gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:

> I've been using Gnucash for my personal books for a year now so I've
> started to become somewhat familiar with it; now I'm wanting to
> recommend it to our small church (we're still keeping books by hand).
> Expenses is not a problem; our manual chart of accounts fits in very
> nicely with the structure of Gnucash. My challenge is on the other end:
> Contributions. We typically get members who will contribute, say, $100
> to the church budget, $50 to a missions offering, and $10 to some
> special project on one $160 check, and these checks are then deposited
> as one lump into the bank the next business day.
>
> I do get the use of split transactions, just not exactly sure as how to
> best structure them in order to keep track of each member's individual
> contributions, both undesignated and designated, while at the same time
> minimizing the workload of the finance committee...for many of whom
> "high-tech" means a mechanical pencil!
>
> Oh, while I'm thinking about it...our church participates in the
> "cooperative program", where we pledge a percentage of our undesignated
> receipts to denominational causes, which is then paid quarterly or so.
> Works similar to the "sales tax payable" liability account I have set up
> for my personal video business. I'm asking for suggestions to "automate"
> the tracking of these percentage amounts, again in order to minimize
> workload.
>
> --
>
> --------Eric H. Bowen
> eric at ehbowen.net <mailto:eric at ehbowen.net>
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