By Matt Waltherton

Does church accounting software differ from business accounting software?

There are commercial accounting software products available designed primarily for businesses, plus church specific accounting software that will probably be more appropriate for your needs. You should keep in mind that a nonprofit organization like a church, has accounting needs that are much different than those of a for profit business.

A big difference is that churches will find the need to use fund style accounting which has no role in a business accounting system. It would be quite unusual to find a church or any other non-profit that did not use fund accounting. This special type of accounting style will create purpose driven categories of assets and liabilities.

Properly used, church accounting makes a distinction between restricted funds such as mission donations and those that are unrestricted for the general budget. Both church and business organizations need verifiable audit trails, but tax differences result in significantly different data collection and data organization.

Can your church make use of free church accounting software?

A simple accounting program even if it is a business type might work for the needs of a small congregation. A potential problem with not using a more sophisticated system is that if someone with bad intentions makes incorrect entries to cover up financial wrongdoing it could be difficult to find who did it or even what was done. This could prove to be an audit nightmare.

Some other problems would arise if you used a business style accounting program. You would need to find additional freestanding software to record contributions or attendance because business accounting software has no reason to includes theses capabilities. In addition, if your congregation is already quite large, you probably should check out some of the inexpensive programs for sale because your needs may be beyond the scope of the free choices.

It would be wonderful if more church accounting software would be made available at little or no cost, especially for those congregations that are just getting started. Some of the software vendors have reduced the price or given software to small congregations so it would certainly not hurt to ask.

About the Author:

Would you like to find some great performing free church accounting software? Check out our site to find the best free church software downloads for your church accounting.