What is accounting and why does it matter to your church? Accounting is the measuring and disclosure of information related to finances. This can often be used by the leaders of the church to determine the financial status of the church, but more importantly, it also discloses the abilities of the church to manage its assets that God has provided.

So, what accounting software should you use for your church? Does it really matter if you use an outside accountant or should you make the investment for your own accounting software package?

One of the most beneficial aspects to accounting is the wide variety of accounting programs and software packages that are available to churches these days. Since many computer programs are in use, data can be quickly transferred and shared now more easily than it ever has been able to.

One of the most important decisions that you need to find out about is what type of accounting will your church follow. There is the cash basis (most churches use this), the accrual basis and some variations of these two. With computers, the spreadsheets and programs that are in use now make it a lot easier to keep track and categorize the various functions that are specific to a church.

Accounting is tied to the invention and dissemination of the double entry bookkeeping process.Different Accounting Software Solutions available today:

ACCPAC web-based accounting, launched the ACCPAC Online web site in 1999 which allows end users to run ACCPAC from a simple browser for a small monthly rental fee.

Intuit’s QuickBooks for the Web represents a new product from scratch. Microsoft Small Business Manager is a new player on the block which is a scaled down version of Great Plains Accounting Software. Netledger centralized net computing renamed Oracle Small Business Manager Peachtree. This product was the older Peachtree Office Accounting product and is also a web-based solution. In 2000, Peachtree added a web-based module to its’ flagship Peachtree Complete Accounting product called Peachtree Web Accounting.

SAP mySAP – web-based accounting featuring a limited number of SAP modules.

So it appears that there are 2 different types of Accounting Software:

Web Based Accounting: which is one application on a Web Server running everybody’s application.

There are of course advantages and disadvantages to this type of application, immediately coming to mind is confidentiality and the security of the Servers being used as well as possible breakdowns.

While each church has different needs and requirements depending upon their financial status, there are just as many financial and church accounting software programs that can be used. When in doubt, each person and church should really check and explore what each package has to offer and see if it is cost effective to learn the software and some accounting basics, or just hire an accountant and let them worry about the software.