SBA for Churches

[Another Brian]

I'm working on the books for a medium size church. Currently we use
QuickBooks Basic for the accounting work and PowerChurch for the
membership giving tracking. This means that the weekly giving must be
entered twice. We're looking for a single product that can replace
both. Can SBA fairly easily manage the individual giving of 300
people? Can it generate a report on how much each person gave vs. how
much they pledged? How well does it integrate with Business Contact
Manager so that for each giver we can link in their name, address,
email, phone, etc.? How well does SBS compare to QuickBooks Premier
Nonprofit?

I'm trying to gather arguments for and against each option:
- SBS with BCM
- QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit
- Staying with what we got.

Thank you for any help
Brian

 

[Allan Martin]

I'm working on the books for a medium size church. Currently we use
QuickBooks Basic for the accounting work and PowerChurch for the
membership giving tracking. This means that the weekly giving must be
entered twice.

Why? There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that use two products
for their record keeping. One for the front office and one for the back
office. There is no reason all the detail must be entered into QB again,
only summaries from PowerChurch. Front office applications like PowerChurch
often have special features that will never be matched by generic
applications like QB or SBA.



We're looking for a single product that can replace

 

[Another Brian]

Why? There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that use two
products for their record keeping. One for the front office and one
for the back office. There is no reason all the detail must be
entered into QB again, only summaries from PowerChurch. Front office
applications like PowerChurch often have special features that will
never be matched by generic applications like QB or SBA.

Why you ask? The office staff find PowerChurch to be hard to use. It
is very hard to integrate its member data into Outlook. We can export
the member list and spend quite awhile massaging it in order to import
it into Outlook, but we then end up with lots of duplicates in Outlook
that must be manually cleaned out. The weekly giving must be entered
into PowerChurch in order to generate the member giving tracking. The
same information is entered into QuickBooks to make a deposit. If
there is a fat-finger typo in this process, it takes time to discover
if the error was in PowerChurch or QuickBooks. PowerChurch isn't user
friendly. We don't use most of the features of PowerChurch since we do
not need them. A unified application would make life easier.

 

[Allan Martin]

Why you ask? The office staff find PowerChurch to be hard to use. It is
very hard to integrate its member data into Outlook. We can export the
member list and spend quite awhile massaging it in order to import it into
Outlook, but we then end up with lots of duplicates in Outlook that must
be manually cleaned out. The weekly giving must be entered into
PowerChurch in order to generate the member giving tracking. The same
information is entered into QuickBooks to make a deposit. If there is a
fat-finger typo in this process, it takes time to discover if the error
was in PowerChurch or QuickBooks. PowerChurch isn't user friendly. We
don't use most of the features of PowerChurch since we do not need them. A
unified application would make life easier.

If PowerChurch is that bad then you should eliminate staying with what you
have as a choice.

 

[Chris Schatte]

Hi Brian,
SBA 06 and BCM v2 work very well together. Your topic (non profit) has been
discussed previously. You could do a search on the group for relevant results.
Also, you could look here:
http://sba.microsoft.com/release.html?txg=6cd9e4b1-253c-480d-9959-d71731d958e9
for information on the new version.
You could download a trial of SBA 06 and test along with Outlook w BCM. Be
sure to update to the current "service packs" for both.