User Support Forum

I am the admin for a small church. Recently our treasurer has left. We have no records to transfer so I have to start totally new to the whole program. How do I begin putting in bills….already paid by debit or credit card and bills which are automatically paid from bank account and bills that need checks written. Help please. Thank you

Ideally you want to pay bill from Accounts Payable. I would recommend starting off by checking in Accounting>Accounts Payable>Maintain Vendor Records to check if you have Vendors set up for each of your bills. If these are setup, it should be fairly easy to move forward.

You have a few options when it comes to actually paying the bill; you can create an invoice for a Vendor either directly on their Vendor Record, or in Maintain Open Invoices and adding an Invoice for the Vendor. Once this is done, you can print the checks by going to Accounting>Accounts Payable>Print Checks> Pay Open Invoices. If you're handwriting a check, you'll create the records using Maintain Manual Checks.

It would also be worthwhile to check in Accounting>Accounts Payable>Repeating Items>Maintain Repeating Items to check if any of your regular bills are set up as Repeating Items. These make the bill paying process easier, because you can choose the Release Repeating Items option to create Invoices for each of the Vendors that do have recurring payments.

Here's a link to a video on our Knowledgebase that may help clarify. There are a lot of other great learning resources in the Knowledgebase as well, and might be worth your time to peruse them. https://www.powerchurch.com/support/507 ... ansactions

LoriHCC wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 01, 2022 8:49 am

I am the admin for a small church. Recently our treasurer has left. We have no records to transfer so I have to start totally new to the whole program. How do I begin putting in bills….already paid by debit or credit card and bills which are automatically paid from bank account and bills that need checks written. Help please. Thank you

I'm not sure that Zasalamel answered your question completely.

As far as Credit Card bills, check to see if the previous Treasurer created a Liability account for the credit card. This allows you to enter credit card purchases as they come in properly charging the correct expense accounts, then you reconcile the credit card statement to what is in the system.
In this case, you would enter these using a MANUAL CHECK, using the Credit Card Liability account as the CREDIT account, and the proper ministry expense account as the DEBIT account.

If they didn't setup a credit card liability system, you would need to enter each transaction from the credit card statement prior to paying the credit card statement. If you write a check to pay for the credit card bill, you would enter this on an INVOICE, not a manual check. In this case the Checking Account would be the CREDIT account, and each entry from the statement would (again) be assigned to the proper ministry expense as DEBIT accounts.

As Zasalamel said, check to see if you have the proper VENDORS setup before you do anything going forward.

Since you also mentioned Debit Card payments, this would also be on a MANUAL CHECK, using the checking account (which I assume is linked to the debit card) as the CREDIT account, and the ministry expense account as the DEBIT account. Obviously, you would select the VENDOR the item or service was purchased from.

As far as EFT (direct debit) bills, you would do the same as the Debit Card payment.

May I suggest that the church invest in the Powerchurch online video training for the Accounting Functions of Powerchurch. Its a one time purchase, so anyone can view them going forward. Its well work the time and money.

https://www.powerchurch.com/training/videos/