Individual Youth Accounts

[Lila Burmeister]

I am wondering if there is a good way to track income and expenses for each individual youth in our youth group. We have a part-time youth director, and the pastors would rather he use his limited time for activities, and we'll take care of the paperwork in the office. I know that I can assign each one an envelope number, and when they have money come in for a fundraiser that is split between participating youth, it could be entered to their envelope number. However, when they attend a camp or event and use some of that money, would each youth have to be set up as a vendor to track that? Is it better to just enter lump sums into Power Church and keep track of individual youth in excel? Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks!

[JohnDMeyers]

Tracking the income is best done in Contributions with envelope numbers.

If you really want to track the expenses, then you could use sub-account numbers.

Johnny Jones would be subaccount 206.

Camp expense account 01-5510-000 for general camp expenses.

Create 01-5510-206 for Johnny Jones.
Create 01-5100-207 for Suzie Smith.

When you write a check to the camp, use the Camp vendor account and use the sub-account as the expense account. In other words, make the check out to the Camp, not to the youth.

If Johnny Jones also has expense for some other account, create a similar subaccount there.

01-5617-206 for example.

To find all of Johnny Jones expenses, run an income and expense report with 206 to 206 in the subaccount field.

[NeilZ]

John,

I trust you're saying that you should track income by contributor to flow into the central account, not an individual envelope number for each youth ?

I'm thinking individual numbers would get rather unwieldy, not to mention that it could trigger that IRS rule where money given to one individual for mission work, etc, is not deductible.

[JohnDMeyers]

Neil:

Yeah. I was thinking of using envelope numbers only on the contribution side that would go into the General Income or General Missions accounts.

[Lila Burmeister]

I hadn't thought of using sub-accounts-- I think that will work well.
Thanks!!