Thanks all for your help. I’m going to close off comments on this now. If you have something else important to say about it (other than discouraging me from doing it, which I’m convinced of!), email me.

In previous years, we did all our donation entries and receipting in Quickbooks. In an effort to simplify the Treasurer’s work, provide for better receipting, and not tie up Quickbooks for something it wasn’t really suited for, we purchased DONATION this year. For us, it is a simple matter to take DONATION’s Summary Report for a given date (which corresponds to a bank deposit) and enter that information into Quickbooks as a split bank deposit. We have a correspondence between DONATION Categories and Quickbooks Income/Expense Accounts.

Dan, I don’t think I would devote any time to this option.

I think the reason I thought of doing this is that brand new users or prospective users often ask about this. I usually say that it just isn’t that big a deal, because (as several of you said) it’s one simple transaction to enter in QuickBooks (or whatever your accounting system is) and you are only entering category totals, not details, so there’s very little double entry. And I have to admit that people generally seem to accept this answer. But I’ve never been sure whether that’s really OK with them, or it’s not, but they figure it’s all the answer they will get so they don’t argue.

I see this as something that sounds good but is not very useful.. for several reasons:

1. There are MANY ways to set up QB for charities. QB is not designed to do fund accounting so one has to get around this shortfall by using classes or equity accounts for income and expenses to special project funds, and… the list goes on. Even for those who choose a basic method, the details can be quite different. In my case, undesignated giving goes through the P&L.. other giving does not, but it all shows up in Donation as different types of donations..

2. Inputting to QB is not that difficult. Having an automatic transfer would be worth nothing to me, personally.

3. There are several versions of QB being uses and not all are the same nor interchangeable.. I use QB Online.. it is not interchangeable with the desktop QB.

I would kindly suggest that your time could be better spent somewhere else…

David

First, which accounting system? All of my clients who use Donation use Simply Accounting. Is QuickBooks really the most popular? I know of many other accounting systems in regular use including many proprietary programs. Once you start with one where will the effort stop?

Second, this activity will make Donation go beyond what it’s original scope was as I understood it. Donation is an excellent receipting program. Let’s keep it that way, it does not need to become a front end to one or more accounting packages.

Neither Simply Accounting nor QuickBooks has seen the need to develop a module to be able to receipt donations in the style similar to the excellent Donation program. Why do you see the need to spend so much effort to develop the deposit journal when it takes but one entry, less than 90 seconds per week for our church and it is similar for all of my clients.

Minor issue, I deal with four of the major banks in Canada with different clients, and in every case we use the deposit slip prepared from Simply Accounting or one completed on an Excel (or Quattro Pro) spreadsheet and never purchase the Bank’s deposit books/forms.

IMHO – I think your time would be better directed elsewhere. Maybe a survey of the users is required to find the useful items to work on but not necessarily to add to the scope. Programmed tie-ins aren’t always the most useful.

Clyde

In Quickbooks there is an option to “select” items for deposits. That allows you to credit customer accounts with their payment on the date the check is received. When a deposit is actually made you select the checks and the date the checks were actually deposited and in that way the Quickbooks deposit will match the bank statement deposit. I mention this because this is a slick way of keeping track of when a check is received versus when it is deposited. To do this in Donation seems to be a monumental task.

As far as not entering items into donation I do that now but not quite in the context you referred to. I have many donors who do not require me to track their checks and many more who just give cash and don’t want a receipt either. This requires me to keep a spreadsheet for the non-receipted donations and entering the receipted ones in Donation. In my spreadsheet for non-receipted donations I list the different currencies, a change category and a list of checks. This simplifies the count process as well as filling out the deposit slip which asks for currency, coin and checks. Then I use the Donation summary report to get the total currency and total checks to record in my spreadsheet to get the total deposit. While there may be an easier way to do this, I have not thought of it. This feature would benefit me more than anything else.

I use Quicken as we are a small church but Quickbooks is quite popular here in the States and I use it in four of the companies I do work for. But frankly, to enter a deposit in any accounting software is really quite a simple matter (one journal entry) and it seems that the added value this sort of interface adds isn’t that great. If Quickbooks thought the church market was that significant they could utilize thier 1099 tracking feature (payments to individuals not on payroll) and produce receipts for donors who would be tracked right in Quickbooks.

Sorry, probably too much information.

I do actually think that after getting some ideas from those of you on the blog, I may have to survey all users on these questions, to be sure to get it right. (And, to be sure that there’s actually enough demand for this to even bother with it.)