Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2017 21:44:30 -0000
Take a look at MemInfo (www.MemInfo.com)
Written by Unitarians for Unitarians.
Online and desktop versions.
Small churches (less than 100 families in the database) can use the desktop
version for free.
========================
Art Lieberman, Ph.D.
MemInfo
Support at MemInfo.com
(919) 200-0251
6512 Six Forks Rd. #402-B
Raleigh, NC 27615-6526
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Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2017 16:58:54 -0000
I am researching "Donor Management Systems," possibly aka "Contributor
Management Systems."
This would be used by the Annual Giving Campaign, the Endowment Committee,
Capital Campaigns, and other special contribution solicitations.
It would be intended to live outside the Church Management System and be
similar to a commercial Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program, with
provisions for recording donor demographics, maintaining records of contacts
by mail, email, phone calls, and personal discussions. Donation data would
be collected for analysis, segmenting, and targeting, etc.
Is anyone using such a system, or has anyone considered same?
Thanks Much!
Rick Held
Rick
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Rick Held
Volunteer IT Admin First Unitarian Church
Personal Cell: (505) 417-9226
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Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2017 17:56:50 -0000
We're using Realm (from ACS Technologies) as both our church management
software and our CRM/Donor management system.
Chris Piekarz
Chair Technology Committee
Unitarian Unversalist Fellowship of Northern Nevada
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Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2017 17:37:42 -0000
Hello,
If there is anyone on this list using Breeze as their church management
software, can you tell me what you like and don't like about its volunteer
management features? Do you keep track of members' skills and interests?
Do you maintain a history of who was on what committee? What can Breeze do
and not do when it comes to volunteer recruitment and coordination?
Thanks so much for your help.
Lea Smith
Congregational Administrator
Unitarian Universalist Church of Concord
"Connecting in Love and Service - Growing Spiritually - Transforming
Ourselves and Our World"
*My goal is to answer your email within three business days (emergencies
excepted.) Thank you for your patience.*
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Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2017 20:56:48 -0000
Lea,
We are using Breeze but have not yet started using it for volunteer
management.
We switched because it is so much easier to customize than our previous
church mgmt. system and the reporting is a lot easier.
laurie
Laurie Lantz
Congregational Administrator
Countryside Church UU
1025 N Smith Rd, Palatine IL 60067
847-359-8440
www.ccuu.org
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Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2017 17:38:24 -0000
I an a new treasurer at a small congregation and need software to manage the budget and contributions. I plan to use it on my iMac so it must be Mac-comatable.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
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Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2017 04:18:26 -0000
We use Icon CMO and I?m very happy with it.
https://www.iconcmo.com/products/iconcmo/ <https://www.iconcmo.com/products/iconcmo/>
Since it?s accessed through a browser, you?ll be able to access it on any platform including the Mac. Since you said you?re a small congregation, I assume you?ll have fewer than 100 families in which case Icon will cost $385/year.
Plus you can try before you buy with their free trial (https://www.iconcmo.com/products/iconcmo/free_trial/ <https://www.iconcmo.com/products/iconcmo/free_trial/>). This will allow you to play in the actual software (loaded with sample data if you wish) so you can know if it?ll work for you before you commit.
Markus Rostig
Treasurer
Neshoba Church, Cordova, TN
135/$200K
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Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2017 22:12:05 -0000
Greetings,
We're in search of bookkeeping software. We use Breeze for our CMS, but it doesn't have an accounting module. We feel that Quickbooks is more than we need, and the price is high. The problem we're encountering is that most church accounting software has pledge tracking included. We already have pledge tracking in Breeze. Suggestions?
Joyce Adams, Outgoing Treasurer
First Universalist Society in Franklin, MA
212/$288
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Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2017 22:22:02 -0000
Take a look at GNU CASH. It is more on the Quicken level, but might be
what you want.
Martin Bauer
Oak Ridge UU Church
280 members/$360,000 budget
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Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2017 18:12:19 -0000
We use Quicken. It?s quite sufficient for our needs. Our treasurer is the
main person to use it, but we keep the data file - and the backups - in
Dropbox, and once a month someone else reconciles the accounts. Quicken
doesn?t support multiple simultaneous users so they coordinate, but it?s
only once a month.
Beth Ogilvie
Starr King UU Church
~140 members/$150K budget
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Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2017 19:01:16 -0000
Good morning,
As a nonprofit, you can purchase QuickBooks Online or desktop through TechSoup for $50 (http://www.techsoup.org/intuit). Many churches use their CMS for pledge tracking details, but then enter the total pledge income for each week (or month) in QuickBooks so that total deposits to your bank account match your general ledger (QuickBooks or other ledger software).
-Conrad
Conrad Sisk, Office Administrator
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains (150 members, $210k budget)
246 South Church Street, Grass Valley, CA 95945
530-274-1675
www.uugrassvalley.org
Sunday Service Times: 9:30 a.m. & 11:30 a.m.
Office Hours: Monday - Thursday 8:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
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Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2017 16:51:58 -0000
Choosing between Quicken and QuickBooks should depend upon what kind of
reporting you and your board require, and how complex your budget and fund
tracking is. QB offers robust reporting functions - everything from reports
on account and fund balances to budget vs. actual. I did not know about
the TechSoup option (THANK YOU Conrad!!) but we have found QB to be worth
the cost.
Leslie Dempsey
Church Bookkeeper
UUCBV, College Station, TX, 72 members, $150K budget
Using QuickBooks Pro for accounting, MemInfo for membership and pledge
tracking
"Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are
always strangers to other people." ~ Bill Moyers
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Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2017 18:59:28 -0000
The recent posts ?Choosing between Quicken and QuickBooks should depend upon what kind of reporting you and your board require, and how complex your budget and fund tracking is. QB offers robust reporting functions - everything from reports on account and fund balances to budget vs. actual. ? and ? As a nonprofit, you can purchase QuickBooks Online or desktop through TechSoup for $50? got my attention.
Ours is a teeny congregation relative to those I see annotated here and our needs are ?covered? with home-grown spreadsheets I helped create for reporting. We record actual donations, bank cash and certificate deposits, expenses and donations made by the congregation to other entities ? no pledging to worry about. However, there is no database to maintain the ?history? save the individual Excel report sheets.
As well, if the next volunteer has no experience with Excel . . . If we could get some sort of ?standard? package folks could use on their laptop (or even in the cloud) it would help when folks decide to move, change positions and such.
If they could purchase a basic accounting software that would provide for maintaining records and reporting by period (monthly, quarterly, end-of-year, etc. as needed for Fifty Dollars, I think they would gladly ?go for it.?
But the Tech Soup site seemed to offer the ?The Intuit Donation Program? as opposed to a basic package.
I am not familiar with either Quicken or Quick Books, much less a non-profit version, thus do not know which features to look for or where to find a side-by-side comparison but thought to post here in light of the discussion referenced to see if I could get an answer I could present to the ?board?
Thanks,
Charles
UUCCC.org
Lenoir, NC
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Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2017 19:08:00 -0000
There are actually a number of choices for Quickbooks through TechSoup.
Here's a link. Our Fellowship uses Quick Books Premier 2018 for an admin
fee of only $50.
http://www.techsoup.org/intuit.
Katharina Kelsey
Starr King Unitarian Fellowship
142 Members/ $165K
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Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2017 19:10:25 -0000
Is that $50 a one time purchase or an annual fee?
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Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2017 20:21:03 -0000
one time
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Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2017 19:15:55 -0000
Good morning!
I am not familiar with Quicken, but my impression is that it is generally used by individuals for personal finances, rather than by businesses. I also have an impression that it is waning in popularity and support because of competition from personal finance apps like Personal Capital and free personal / small business accounting software like Wave. These impressions are not very well-researched though, so please take them with a grain of salt =).
We use QuickBooks Premier 2017 (the desktop version). When we brought our bookkeeping in-house (I now do the books as the Office Administrator), we started out with the online version (the earlier version of what is now "QuickBooks Online Plus"), but the reporting was not robust enough for our needs. We used to contract a bookkeeper who had an Accounting degree and who purchased her own QuickBooks Premier (desktop) software that she used with all of her clients; the system she had used for us for years was too complicated to transfer over to QB Online though we did spend a couple months trying to make it work. The Board of Trustees wanted to keep the same level of reporting and complexity that we had before, so we opted to move up to the desktop version to accommodate this. Additionally, I am the only person who needs access to QuickBooks right now, so we haven't needed the easy multi-user access that is afforded by QuickBooks Online.
I would say that in your situation QuickBooks Online would probably be ideal. It's in the cloud, it updates and backs up in real time, and there is much more available in terms of free online tutorials and FAQs for the online version than for the desktop version. From what I can tell, it is simpler than QuickBooks Premier (desktop), and it is easy to set permissions so that multiple users can view the accounts, with or without the ability to edit the accounts. There are ways to use the desktop version with multiple users, but they are more complicated, and involve either setting up an internal server/network for the church, and/or saving your most recent file to DropBox or a similar cloud location so that others can access that file and open it on their home installations of QB Premier (desktop). Also, I believe it is easier to move from a QuickBooks Online file to a QuickBooks Premier (desktop) installation than vice-versa, so if you're on the fence, it would probably make more sense to start with Online for the first year, and then move to Premier (desktop) if your reporting needs increase in the future.
The TechSoup "Intuit donation program" lets you purchase one of the QB options at the link Katharina sent (http://www.techsoup.org/intuit) per year for $50. Be aware that you CANNOT purchase a second QB package at this price in the same year. We purchased QuickBooks Online through the TechSoup program, and then when we needed to "graduate" to the desktop version a couple months later, and had to pay retail price for it. As a note for general reference, the "non-profit edition" / version of QuickBooks only comes as an option when you purchase QuickBooks Premier (desktop); when you purchase Premier, you can choose to install it as a "Nonprofit Edition", "Contractor Edition", "General Business Edition", "Manufacturing & Wholesale Edition", "Professional Services Edition", or "Retail Edition". I don't know the advantages of each of these, but our system is installed as the "General Business Edition", and it has been suitable for our needs though we are a non-profit. As far as I know there is only one "edition"/version of QuickBooks Online, which is suitable for a wide variety of business, contractor, and non-profit needs.
Well, I hope this is helpful and wasn't too tedious or extended. Best of luck!
-Conrad
Conrad Sisk, Office Administrator
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains (150 members, $210K budget)
246 South Church Street, Grass Valley, CA 95945
www.uugrassvalley.org
Sunday Service Times: 9:30 a.m. & 11:30 a.m.
Office Hours: Monday - Thursday 8:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
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Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2017 20:06:09 -0000
Afternoon!
It is a one-time fee to buy QuickBooks Premier 2018 (the desktop version, which is installed locally on one computer). It is an annual fee / subscription if you purchase QuickBooks Online (the cloud version which requires no local installation). You would need to purchase QuickBooks Premier 2019 (desktop version) next year if you want the latest version, but I think it is common for small orgs to use, for example, QB "2017" for 2017-2019, and the upgrade to QB "2020" in 2020, rather than upgrading every year.
Note that it is $50 for ONE user account for QuickBooks Premier (desktop version); it is $125 for 3 user accounts for QB Premier (desktop) . The $50 annual subscription to QB Online gives you 5 separate user accounts, and it is much easier to configure multi-user access with Online than with Premier (desktop). If your bookkeeper wants an account that has full edit access, and you also want to set up an account for your less-computer-or-accounting-confident Treasurer such that they can only view accounts and therefore cannot accidentally "edit" work that your bookkeeper has done, you will need more than one user account to accomplish this. Similarly, if you want two people to be able to work on and/or view the books at the same time on separate computers, you will need more than one user account. Also, if you want more than one person to have access the accounts simultaneously, especially from home or not on the same network at the church, it is significantly more involved to configure and less seamless to utilize with Premier (desktop) than with Online (cloud). If it's just one person doing the books who generates PDF or Excel reports to send to others rather than giving others direct access to QuickBooks, than QB Premier (desktop) is excellent and lower cost than the online subscription if you don't buy the latest version every year; that is what we do here.
-Conrad
Conrad Sisk, Office Administrator