Choosing The Best Church Accounting Software: QuickBooks vs. ChMeetings

Accounting Features Offered by Quickbooks

Quickbooks provides a comprehensive suite of financial management features, for different types of business organizations. There is some church-specific functionality that this software offers. Let’s explore the available features below:

• 1. General Bookkeeping and Accounts Management: Quickbooks is a powerful tool that lets you keep your general bookkeeping and manage your accounts using various cash flow features, including bank sync.
• 2. Budgeting: QuickBooks lets churches create budgets and track their financial activity against them.
• 3. Bank Reconciliation: which helps ensure that your church’s financial records match your bank statements.
• 4. Financial Reporting: QuickBooks generates various financial reports, including profit & loss statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. These reports can be customized to meet the specific needs of your church.
• 5. Payroll Management: Churches with paid servants can use this feature to manage payroll operations and corresponding financial records.
• 6. Multi-user Access: QuickBooks allows multiple users to access the software, which can benefit churches with a finance team.

Benefits

Quickbooks provides many features that large churches may benefit from without external tools. This software can handle many church operations, not just accounting, but also giving and payments, for example. Quickbooks is far from a church management software, like ChMeetings is, but can help churches successfully manage the money side of their mission.

Limitations

Complexity is the greatest limitation when using Quickbooks in a church. The software itself has decades of development behind it and can perform many tasks, but it also requires a lot of training for servants to use it successfully - both in terms of the software itself; and in the field of accounting. Most of the time it takes a trained accountant to make the best use of this platform. Moreover, having a beginner accountant or one with no training use complex, professionally geared software can lead to errors and potential financial, reputational, or legal issues.

Besides the complexity, another important factor might be the cost. To the potential training costs (both in time and money), churches must also add the subscription price, which starts at $49.50/month at the time of writing. For small churches, this can be a rather high price to pay just for an accounting tool.

Accounting Features Offered By ChMeetings

ChMeetings is a church management software (ChMS) that focuses primarily on managing the congregation, events, and communication while covering some fundamental financial management features that most churches need. Its accounting features include:

• 1. Account Management: with options to sync with your bank or import transactions from various accounting software, including Quickbooks.
• 2. Money Transfer Between Accounts: If you made a bank transfer between your accounts, you can easily record it using a transfer transaction.
• 3. Fund Accounting: The software offers tools to manage different church funds, making it easier to allocate and track how money is used for different aspects of your mission
• 4. Contribution Deposits: ChMeetings lets you collect and manage giving - both online and in person. If your church collects cash that doesn’t reach your bank, the money can be accounted for and the respective transactions can be added as deposits.
• 5. Income and Expense Stream Tracking: ChMeetings does this through Categories assigned to each of your transactions. These tell you exactly where the money comes from or where it goes.
• 6. Documentation Attachments for Transactions: If you need to back up a transaction with documents, you can easily attach them.
• 7. Financial Reporting: ChMeetings provides essential financial reports that are geared specifically toward church needs, such as balance sheets, income statements, income and expense stream reports, fund reports, payee reports, and more.

Benefits

ChMeetings is user-friendly and provides features for a wide range of church operations; not just accounting. For example, you can manage your congregation, organize events, collect giving, book appointments, publish content, and more.

When it comes to accounting; however, there are two major benefits that ChMeetings offers when compared to Quickbooks:

• Easy Fund Accounting: Quickbooks also allows you to track funds; but the process is much more complicated. With ChMeetings, all you have to do is create the Fund and then assign relevant transactions to it. That’s it! You can then generate fund-specific reports once you get some transactions going; to gain insight into how your money is spent.
• Access Permissions: While Quickbooks allows you to restrict access to specific features based on user roles, the feature is only available on their Advanced plan, which costs $117.5/month at the time of writing. ChMeetings lets you provide role-based access to the entire accounting module to protect sensitive financial data, and you can get it for a lower price. Check our current pricing. This is not the same feature as the one offered by Quickbooks, but if you don’t need complicated accounting, don’t want to pay a lot for it, but still want to protect your data from unauthorized access, this option does this successfully
• Support and Training: If you want access to support and training from Quickbooks, then you must subscribe to the Advanced Plan we mentioned above. With ChMeetings, you get free support, and our training resources are public.

Limitations

ChMeetings is not a fully-fledged accounting platform like Quickbooks. It is an all-in-one Church Management Software that provides an accounting module covering the essentials that most churches require. While this simplicity is friendly even to a beginner treasurer, it may not be enough for large churches with complex financial activity.

Why QuickBooks May Not Be the Best Fit for Your Church

Quickbooks is primarily designed for businesses rather than churches, even though it is marketed to churches too, and provides powerful accounting features. It is a complex tool, with a steep learning curve, and can become overwhelming, particularly for smaller churches with servants who are not necessarily trained accountants.

ChMeetings, on the other hand, is tailored specifically for churches, offering tools that meet their unique needs. For churches seeking an all-in-one solution that combines accounting with other key church operations, ChMeetings may be a suitable solution.

Why You Might Want To Choose Quickbooks For Your Church Accounting

For large churches with complex accounting needs; ChMeetings may not be able to cover accounting needs (though it may still be a good fit in terms of church management).

The Bottom Line

All in all, QuickBooks is for the pros. If your church team includes at least one, then by all means, go for it. But if you’re a small church with financially untrained servants or you are already looking for a Quickbooks alternative, then we invite you to give ChMeetings a try. Choose a Demo account and you can try the Accounting module free of charge for 14 days.