[GNC] New user - anyone else using GnuCash for PCC (church) accounts? Advice?

doncram doncram at gmail.com
Tue Sep 22 23:20:16 EDT 2020


About invoicing making GnuCash show assets (accounts receivable) when the
dues are billed (or pledges receivable), I don't see why that would be much
of a problem.  Couldn't that be addressed by your entering a journal entry
to zero out the asset balance and reverse the income recognized, whenever
financial reports are to be issued, and especially at the end of a
reporting year?

The financial statements don't have to be accurate every day, it is only at
closing dates when adjusting entries need to be made.  For an organization
which uses cash accounting on a daily basis, e.g. perhaps recording revenue
only when cash is received to avoid having to create invoices in the
accounting system, the adjusting entry at the end of the year would be to
go in the opposite direction, to recognize some amount of accounts
receivable for work done already in December.  For example there is a
for-profit company i know that doesn't bother to invoice because they
always require payment from the customer before they will hand over their
completed custom product.  And while it might again come across to some as
fraudulent or lying or the like, but it happens to be okay by GAAP to make
this entry dated December 31 at a later true date, after the amounts are
known from the actual payments being received during January, so that the
prior year financial statements give a correct picture.   Others adjusting
entries are to recognize depreciation if any, to recognize any extra
accounts payable or receivable or prepaid expenses or unearned revenues
(where cash has been received from a customer but the work hasn't yet been
done) that one knows about but which haven't been recorded yet.  These
might only be done at quarterly closes or only at end of year.   It simply
is not necessary for invoicing status to be correct at every moment.

About invoicing members of a nonprofit, I hadn't even thought about using
accounting system to ask them for their annual fees.  Possibly it could be
efficient to do that way for some nonprofits, but in nonprofits that I know
the membership info is kept in a separate spreadsheet, with address list
used in a mail-merge (at least I hope they don't handle each new letter
individually), handled by membership person(s) instead of accountant.  So
there is a whole lot of duplication to the accounting system where each
payment received must be entered from scratch, and possibilities for
errors.  "Membership database" softwares exist that allow members to pay
dues at a website in a way that doesn't require separate accounting
entries, and allows them to update their info and allows many reports, and
supports much more.  Including one true freeware package developed under
Gnu Public license or similar that sounded good and I would be interested
to try, but it has warning that its developer-programmer no longer will
provide support (maybe it was one of those reviewed at
https://blog.capterra.com/top-7-free-open-source-membership-management-software-products/
?).  It would be _awesome_ if someone could take over one of these and make
it compatible with GnuCash!

Don


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