Are you looking for free software for church bookkeeping? Or wondering what free church software might be available for your small church? Do you find yourself interested in learning about free bookkeeping software for churches, or free church financial software applications? If so, then you are in the right place.
Are you looking for free church software to manage your finances? Finding it difficult to locate free church software? If you’re scratching your head trying to choose between free accounting software, donation management service and other free small business tools, then this blog post on small business software will meet your expectations.
GnuCash
GnuCash is a free, open-source double-entry bookkeeping system created with the goal of providing capabilities similar to Quicken.
GnuCash has been around since 1998, so it has almost two decades of development and refinement on its side.
While GnuCash isn’t specifically designed for churches, it does have features tailored for small businesses.
Even more helpful, Jacob Oommen of Finance and Accounting for Churches created a comprehensive, 14-part guide on using GnuCash for church accounting.
Oommen stumbled upon GnuCash when he was tasked with taking charge of the accounting at St. Stephens Mar Thoma Syrian Church in Bangalore.
“On taking over my duties, I discovered that the accounts in our church were maintained using the old method of Physical Ledgers,” he wrote. “We decided at the outset to migrate to a software system to maintain the accounts.”
“I decided to do a prototype bookkeeping implementation using (GnuCash), to evaluate how it could be used for our purposes,” he added. “If it worked, it could potentially save, our church, and possibly other churches, a lot of money.”
Oommen documented the process on his blog, which provides detailed instructions on everything from the basics through advanced features like year-end reports.
Although Oommen originally implemented GnuCash at his church in 2013, he updated the guide in February of 2017 to reflect several new features including auctions and split transactions.
If you have enough free time and computer expertise, you can follow Oommen’s plan to download GnuCash and customize it for your church, all for the bargain price of $0 (minus your own labor).
QuickBooks Premier
We typically recommend QuickBooks Online for small businesses, but that is not the case for small churches. If your church is on the smaller side, QuickBooks Premier, with its nonprofit capabilities, may be your best small church accounting software option.
Why do we recommend QuickBooks Premier — a desktop-based product — instead of cloud-based QuickBooks Online? Primarily, it’s because of donor reporting functionality. Although you can employ workarounds to make QuickBooks Online work for your church’s accounting needs, QuickBooks Online doesn’t provide any donor reporting, nor will it print end-of-year donation statements. QuickBooks Premier does both with minimal effort.
Using a desktop product like QuickBooks Premier means you lose the flexibility of anytime, anywhere access to your accounting records, unless you choose to pay for a hosting service like Right Networks. However, the functionality you gain with QuickBooks Premier — and the time you’ll save at year-end makes this inconvenience negligible for most small churches.
QuickBooks Premier requires a one-time purchase of $499.95, but nonprofit organizations can typically receive a significant discount if they purchase through TechSoup. If you need church accounting software with payroll capabilities, QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll is available for $31.50 per month plus $2 per employee per month.
QuickBooks Premier add-on: Breeze
As your church grows, you might find you need more functionality than QuickBooks Premier offers alone. In particular, your growing church will need to manage volunteers and events, enable online giving, and possibly even run email campaigns.
Enter Breeze, a web-based church management software for small and medium-sized churches. Breeze is not a full accounting software, but it does produce most of the reports your church leadership will want. If you want a full church accounting software solution — and we do recommend using one — Breeze bridges the gap between QuickBooks Premier alone and more robust (and costly) church-specific accounting and management software.
You can integrate Breeze with QuickBooks Premier, or as this article on Breeze’s website explains, you can also make manual entries into QuickBooks — or any other church accounting software.
Breeze costs a flat fee of $50 per month for unlimited users, unlimited members, and all their features, including support, the Breeze smartphone app, and all upgrades — making it one of the most affordable church management options on this list.
FlockBase
FlockBase is an ERP for churches and businesses of all sizes and intended for accountants, treasurers and more. Its versions include cloud and desktop.
Unique Benefits
FlockBase comes with various benefits that set it apart from its competitors. These benefits include:
- Multiple Locations: If a church has multiple locations, you can draft a list of classes and delegate each transaction to a specific one. This function also offers profit and loss reports that you filter by each class.
- Closed Date: You can input a closed date that notifies other users or prevents them from entering or modifying a dated transaction before the close date. Manage the users list to determine which users can or can’t override the closed date warning.
- Data Backup: Leverage this tool to create a backup of their data files in case you accidentally lose critical information.
- Direct Deposit: Pay staff and vendors directly through their bank accounts.
Church Membership
Chronicle records of members and groups, contributions, pledges, attendance records, reports and communications with the church membership apparatus.
Online Giving
This module enables donors to schedule repetitive contributions. It’s also partnered with Forte Payment Systems for integrated online giving.
Payroll
Automatically cipher and retain federal taxes, track and record state taxes withheld on employee W-2 forms and pay staff while complying with IRS regulations thanks to the payroll tool. This accessory commits every employee paycheck to memory and recalls the correct paycheck for particular employees. You may also track employee payroll and print year-end W-2 sheets.
Reporting
This attribute permits you to track balances, income and expenses by a specific fund. It handles multiple reports for profit and loss, balance sheets and general ledger, as well as more than 25 reports to pick and choose.
Budgeting
Track and compare actual income and expenditures to your projected budget with the budgeting apparatus.
Bank Reconciliation
Add new accounts to reconcile, evaluate reconciled accounts and uncleared transactions and review the difference in balance with the bank reconciliation appliance. You may also balance account and bank balances.
More Mentionable Modules
Although FlockBase has all the common features for this type of software, some additional features are worth mentioning to streamline your accounting practices. These additional accessories include:
- Fund Accounting: Administer general funds and restricted funds and implement a consistent numbering scheme to identify funds and accounts.
- Paycheck Management: Govern minister and non-minister paychecks and calculate paycheck hours.
- Deposit Import: Input deposits from contribution and membership tracking programs outside of Flockbase.
- Transaction Scheduling: Initiate future or regular interval transactions.
Limitations
FlockBase comes with a few limitations. These disadvantages include:
- Not closing years or starting an accounting period for a new fiscal year.
- Non-sequential checks, making bank statement balancing time consuming.
PowerChurch Plus
PowerChurch Plus is an on-premise small business solution for churches and nonprofits catered to bookkeepers, treasurers and accountants.
A preview of PowerChurch Plus’ contributions tab.
Unique Benefits
PowerChurch Plus has unique strengths and capabilities that sets itself apart from the competition. These strengths include:
- Security: Leverage password protection to create numerous user accounts with audit logs that showcase important software activity, including transaction postings, backup restorations and operations that include dates, times and the user that carried them out.
- Backup and Restore: Create small zip file backups for program data as well as backups on floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, media cards and more.
- Integrations: You can integrate this program with Vanco Payment Solutions and Protect My Ministry. You may also electronically file W2 and W3 forms with the E-File tool.
Membership
This element enables you to record individual and family information, conduct group and attendance tracking and communication management.
Contributions
Trace giving history, chronicle pledges, import donations and develop reports with this attribute.
Budgeting
This accessory permits you to input budget amounts for individual accounts or share them by account groups. You may copy budgets from one year to another and change inaccurate ones. You may also export information as Access MDB, XLS, CSV, or DBF files for each account.
Reporting
Email reports directly from the screen preview and email them to one email address, selected members from the membership directory or members from a chosen activity thanks to the reporting appliance. There are 34 fund accounting report templates, 11 accounts receivable templates and 16 payroll report templates to pick and choose from.
You may save and recall report profiles, share report profiles with other users, and assign reports to a default profile. The custom report writer allows you to draft reports from each software module including fund accounting, account balances, accounts receivable data and payroll data.
Bank Reconciliation
Match transactions recorded in PowerChurch Plus to those reported on the bank statement with the bank reconciliation apparatus. You may also generate graphs for account balances.
Payroll
Record infinite payroll transactions for up to 9,999 employees with the payroll function. It comes with adjustable position, department and pay group fields. The fund accounting accessory automatically updates payroll transactions to trace employee contact information including addresses, two phone numbers and email addresses. This component tracks pastor salaries and housing allowances, supports every U.S. Federal and State tax table, installs and tracks pre-tax deductions including retirement and medical insurance and even tracks time off earned and used.
Conclusion:
With the right free software, (or free cloud based software), you can run your corporate accounting services with a lot less trouble. If you’re currently using a manual ledger or paper accounting system, you probably know that these systems can be quite the hassle. But, if you know where to look for it, there are a number of different cloud based software systems that are designed to make your life a little bit easier when it comes to church bookkeeping and managing church finances.