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When it comes to maintaining records of income and expenses, running a churchs finances is similar to running finances of other organizations. An organized and accurate accounting system is crucial to the success of any organization because it helps achieve a transparent and efficient operation. Thus, a church accounting software is a must for a church that aims to improve its accounting system and funds management.

An extensive software offers complete features that can be used separately or at the same time. This software includes features that aid in fund accounting, check registry, budgeting, and payroll. And these features must be interconnected for a convenient recordkeeping. An accounting software should allow managing of different checking and savings accounts. In addition to that, the accounting software must enable users to make and print reports of the latest financial information.

The comprehensive software package must cover fundamental reports such as budget report, balance sheet, contribution statement, expense report, payroll checks, summary of donations, fund balance, tax reports, and transaction reports. It is better if the accounting software is flexible enough so that the reports and charts for presentations can be easily modified.

Usually, most of the people who staff the church offices are either volunteers or have no accounting training. Thus, the church accounting software should have an easy interface and user-friendly functions. The software should not be complicated and can be operated by anyone with basic computer knowledge. Integration of the different features will come in handy in this respect. For example, when posting entries in the check registry, the same data are posted in related fund accounting fields, eliminating the need to enter the same data twice. Most of the commands should be accomplished at one click of the mouse.

Other user-friendly features that should come with a comprehensive software are mail merge and data exporting abilities to other software. Big churches have different offices or several computers in one office. This is the reason why, lastly, the software must be capable of supporting multiple user accounts. This is to avoid processing lags, and also to enable different people to use the system at the same time.

Online backup is another great feature found in a comprehensive church accounting software. CDs, DVDs, external hard drives, and other traditional backup methods are not always reliable. They can be misplaced, corrupted by viruses, or stolen. Online backup stores computer files in a remote server. So no matter what happens to a computer in your church, you will never lose your data. Whats more, the data stored is updated at all times. Data can be retrieved immediately, so the operations of the church will not be disrupted by the data recovery process.

Finally, the software company must be able to provide technical and customer service support. Communicating with the software company must be hassle free via telephone, e-mail, or chat.

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