So, if you want to send quarterly receipts, just run Receipt -> All Receipts at the end of each quarter. But then you can’t also send an annual receipt, because all of the donations will already have been receipted. Instead, you send an annual report, if you want to. This is all discussed in more detail in the Help, in the topic Statements and Receipts.

Thanks for the info on fund accounting programs. I have heard a lot of negative feedback about MembershipPlus, though whether it is any better now that it is under the ACS umbrella, I don’t know.

Regarding the Fund Accounting issue, there are two packages that I have looked at: The first is PowerChurch Plus at

http://www.powerchurch.com/

They have an online version, but I looked at the software. It does fund accounting very well, as far as I could tell by using it in real time and doing some reports. It also does payroll with user-defined tax tables. This eliminates having to subscribe to a payroll update service.

The other is Membership Plus at

http://www.memplushome.com/

I did not test-drive this software, but it is supposed to do fund accounting. It is primarily a membership management program. It does not do payroll.

If you know of such packages that are good, perhaps you could post them here, and I could also post them on the Links page on the program’s web site.

Having answered this, can I suggest that we please try to not use this Blog for things like this, which are really more like tech support? I’m not criticising, just trying to clarify what the blog is for.

I want to reserve the blog for my thoughts and questions to the subscribers, and your responses. Tech support can be done by email, or if you want it to be more visible and/or think it may be of interest to multiple users, on the Support Forum. The Support Forum also has an area for posting your New Feature Suggestions.

Thanks.

Re: Quarterly Contribution Statements:

Reports/Donation/Details-One Page Per Donor yields a usable statement, however, it does not show the donor’s address. If the format of this could be changed so that it shows the name and address in the same place the annual receipt does, so that it could be folded for mailing in a window envelope, this would suffice very nicely.

Re: Fund Accounting:

I have looked at a couple of integrated packages that do the fund accounting function very well, but I do not like the way they handle contributions. Most of them have a “Membership” module that manages a whole lot of extraneous information in addition to contributions. This information does not need to be “managed” in the smaller church. As an example: we do not need a pictorial directory at this point. I much prefer the way your program handles contributions and nothing else. If I could find an accounting program that does fund accounting the right way and only the accounting function, I would jump on it in a minute and use it in concert with your program. It would not matter to me that the two were not integrated as long as you could make a journal entry into the accounting program for the weekly contributions.

I’m not sure what you mean by a quarterly contribution statement. If you do Reports -> Donation -> Details, One Page per Donor, or Category Totals, One Page per Donor, you get to select the date range, so either one can serve as a quarterly statement by entering the desired date range. How does this differ from what you want?

As you say, we have discussed fund accounting before. Quite a few users would like it, but it’s a BIG project – probably several months of concentrated work at least, when I would not be able to devote time to the DONATION program. Then, I still would have to compete with both generic programs like QuickBooks and Peachtree (even though they don’t do fund accounting well), and some existing programs specially aimed at churches, which may in fact do fund accounting adequately.

I would still like to see the program offer an actual quarterly contribution statement. It would also be great if the annual statement could be sub-totaled by quarter.

Our most recent discussion centered around fund accounting. As treasurer of a small church with a limited budget, I could use a program that integrates the contribution function with a good accounting module that does fund accounting right. I am using Peachtree/Non-Profit now, and it does not handle fund accounting reporting requirements under FASB 117 (U. S.) very well. You can mock it up, but quad-entry accounting is a little beyond my comprehension.

I already know your thoughts on this, but it might be interesting to see if anyone else has similar needs.