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Contents

• Introduction
• Legal Disclaimer
• Terminology
  • Transaction
  • Account
  • Category
  • Fund
  • Example
  • Relationship Diagram
• Set Up Accounting
  • Gather Your Data
  • Configure ChMeetings
    • Add Funds
    • Add Categories
    • Add Accounts
      • Important When First Setting Up Your Accounts
    • Configure Import Rules And Import Transactions
• Configure Permissions
• Learn More

 

Watch a 90-second video about Accounting:

 

Introduction

The ChMeetings Accounting module lets you keep track of your finances, providing the essential tools you need to manage accounts, record transactions, and run reports. This guide takes you through the basic accounting notions you need to know and shows you how to set it all up in ChMeetings. 

 

Legal Disclaimer

ChMeetings provides a single-entry accounting system that includes tools to manage Accounts (manage and import transactions, and perform reconciliation), work with Funds, Categories and Payees; as well as create Budgets and run Reports. These tools are developed according to international accounting standards and practices. Please ensure that you use the provided system lawfully, according to the laws that apply to your church. We strongly recommend reaching out to an accounting professional to oversee your finances and ensure they are in good order. 

 

Terminology

Let’s look at some terminology and examples to understand how Accounting works within ChMeetings. We will be working with four key terms: Transaction, Account, Category, and Fund. 

Transaction

The Transaction is an exchange (usually monetary) between your church and another party. Each Transaction can only be assigned to one Account, Fund, and Category, respectively. 

There are three types of Transactions in ChMeetings Accounting: 

• Income: Used to record any transaction representing income; such as giving or event payments, etc.
• Expense: Used to record any transaction representing an expense, such as bill payments, event expenses, etc.
• Transfer: Used to record money that is being moved between Accounts.

Account

In accounting, the Account represents a record of all transactions that occur within an organization - both deposits and withdrawals. These transactions commonly occur within a bank account, and one organization may have several accounts. Within your accounting, the Account holds all assigned Transactions, Funds, and Categories. 

There are two types of Accounts within ChMeetings:

• Asset Accounts are for financial assets or any other property your church owns. The most commonly used asset accounts for churches are checking and savings accounts.
• Liabilities Accounts hold the expenses that your church has not yet paid (called “Liabilities”). Amounts in a liability account represent what your church owes to other parties and can include: loans, tax, accounts payable, etc. 
  
  

Category

The Category is the purpose of a specific transaction. Usually, there are two types of Categories, depending on the type of transactions they hold: Income, and Expense. Each Category can hold multiple Transactions and be assigned to multiple Accounts and Funds. 

Fund

The Fund is a wider purpose to which you may allocate part of your money across accounts. Although it is not technically a subaccount, you could think of a Fund as a subaccount, to which you allocate partial amounts held within your main Accounts. Each Fund can be assigned to multiple Accounts and can hold multiple Transactions and Categories. 

IMPORTANT NOTES

1. To reduce potential confusion throughout our Accounting documentation, we will only use the term “Fund” or “Funds” to refer to the records created within ChMeetings, representing purposes to which you may allocate your money. We will not be using the term “funds” in the sense of “money” or “to fund” in the sense of providing financial resources for something. We will be using synonyms for these particular references.
2. The Funds in your Accounting are not the same as the Funds in your Contributions. They may or may not duplicate in name or purpose, but they are different: 
   • Accounting Funds represent income or expense allocations for accounting purposes.
   • Contribution Funds represent the purposes for which your church may raise money at any point in time. These are not directly connected to your Accounting Funds - From a legal point of view, money raised via Contribution Funds must be imported into your Accounting via your payment transactions, which cannot keep your original Contribution Funds due to e.g. third-party payment providers. Therefore, when importing Contributions, you may or may not choose to use the same Funds for accounting purposes. Learn more about Contribution Funds.
     
     

Example

For example, you may have a Savings Account within which you may want to allocate money to creating a church library. For this purpose, you may, for instance, purchase books and furniture. In this case, you may have the following records: 

Account: Savings Account (which is an Asset account type)
Fund: Library Fund
Categories: Library Expense, Library Income

So, you are thus using the Library Expense or Library Income category to record relevant expenses and income within the Library Fund, with money held within your Savings Account. If, for instance, you have several accounts on record, from which you want to use money for library-related purchases, you can record additional transactions via the Library Fund and the relevant category, but from a different account; for example your Checking Account. 

Relationship Diagram

Here is how Accounts, Transactions, Funds, and Categories relate to each other and work together:

 

Set Up Accounting

To set up your Accounting, you must first gather your data, and then make the necessary configurations within ChMeetings. 

Gather Your Data

Before doing anything in your ChMeetings Accounting, please begin by gathering the data you require to start tracking your finances with us. You will need the following:

1. A list of Accounts and their Balances, which you can get from Bank Statements or Financial Reports (from your bank or previous accounting tools). Please ensure that there is no additional transaction between the time you generate the statement or report, and the time you begin tracking with ChMeetings. You must have the most recent data to start with the correct balances. 
2. A list of Funds and their Balances so you can maintain continuity by adding them to ChMeetings. If you have several balances allocated for specific goals, but you are not calling them “Funds” necessarily; these would become Funds in ChMeetings. Not to be confused with “Budgets”, which you can learn more about here.
3. A list of Income and Expense Categories, again, to add them to ChMeetings and keep your books consistent. 
4. An OFX, QFX, QIF or QBO file containing any transactions that you may want to import to ChMeetings. This is not required if you do not want to import transactions. 
   
   

Configure ChMeetings

To set up your accounting in ChMeetings, you must first create your Funds, because you need a starting balance for each fund when creating your Accounts. Categories also need to be assigned to a Fund upon creation. Here is the setup order we recommend:

 

Add Funds

ChMeetings comes preconfigured with a General Fund, which you cannot remove. You can use this as a catch-all for your transactions or create additional Funds according to your needs. Unless you require very detailed reporting, we recommend limiting the number of Funds you create, to reduce complexity.

To add Funds, go to Accounting > Accounts, and click the ⨁ icon above the Funds widget.

 

Name your Fund and click Save. 

 

Add Categories

ChMeetings comes preconfigured with two default Categories: 

1. General Expenses - meant to be used for expense transactions.
2. General Offerings - meant to be used for giving transactions and other income being received into your accounts.

These Categories cannot be removed, but you can edit their name and associated Fund. You can use these as a catch-all for your transactions or create additional Categories; according to your needs. Unless you require very detailed reporting, we recommend limiting the number of Categories you create, to reduce complexity.

To add Categories, go to Accounting > Categories and click Add Category.

In the Add Category window, configure the following: 

1. Name the Category. We recommend using a short, suggestive name.
2. Select a Type: This determines whether the Transactions you record under this Category represent income or expenses.
3. Select a Default Fund: This is the Fund that is preselected when adding a Transaction to the Category. You can leave this blank and any transactions associated with this Category will default to the General Fund, 
   

 

Add Accounts

To get started adding a new Account, go to Accounting > Accounts, click on the ⨁ icon above the Accounts widget. 

In the Add Account window, follow the steps below: 

1. Account Information: 
   • Name: Give your account a name, such as “Checking”, “Savings”, etc.
   • Type: Select whether this is an Asset or Liability account.

Asset represents what you own - such as a bank account held by your church.
Liability refers to what you owe - such as loans, mortgages, credit cards, etc.

2. Starting Balance: Add the balance from the day before you began tracking transactions in ChMeetings Accounting as the starting balance. You must enter a starting balance for each of your funds. If you did not use Funds previously and do not want to use them moving forward, then your Account balance should be allocated to the General Fund. 
3. Start Date: Add the day when you begin recording transactions in ChMeetings. This is your accounting start date for the account you are adding.
4. Save when ready.
   

 

Important When First Setting Up Your Accounts

Once creating an account, you can no longer edit any information except the Name. Once you begin recording transactions, Accounts can no longer be deleted either, unless you also remove associated transactions. This is standard accounting practice. Removing and recreating accounts may require redoing your initial accounting setup; which is why we recommend that you take great care and ensure that you are entering correct data during initial setup.   

 

Configure Import Rules And Import Transactions

Optionally, you can import transactions into your ChMeetings Accounting. To do this, you must first configure the applicable import rules. 

The transactions you want to import must belong to specific Categories or Funds, you can save time by setting up Rules before import. When applied, these Rules will automatically allocate imported transactions to the corresponding Categories or Funds, depending on the criteria you set. 

To add a new Import Rule, go to Accounting > Accounts, and select the Account to which you want to import transactions. 

Click Import Transactions, then click Manage Rules.

 

In the Manage Rules window, click Add Rule.

In the Add Rule window, configure the following: 

1. Name your Rule.
2. Select the Type of transactions it should filter for.
3. Select the Rule’s Criteria. You can create the following logical operations:
   1. “Description contains / does not contain / is exactly ….” This option matches with the “Description” or “Memo” fields in your import files. In the text field, enter the text by which you want to filter transactions. For example, if we want to assign book-related expenses to the Book Purchase Category and the Library Fund, then we will filter transactions by the word “book”. The text field is not case-sensitive and only accepts single items. Logical operators are not supported. 
   2. “Amount equals / does not equal / is greater than / is less than …” This field matches the transaction amount in your import file.
4. Select an Action: Here is where you decide which Category and which Fund the transaction should be allocated to, once imported.
5. Save when ready.

 

Once your rule is saved, you will see it listed in the Manage Rules window. Here is where you can toggle the Rule on or off, edit I✐) or delete it (🗑). Note that deleted rules cannot be restored.

 

For all active Rules, any imports will be assigned to the corresponding Category and Fund, as set by the Rule.

Please read Manage Accounts > Import Transactions for in-depth guidance about this process.

 

Configure Permissions

If you want specific people to access the Accounting module, you can do so under Users & Roles > Roles & Permissions. Under the Accounting section, you can choose whether the users assigned to the selected role can either View the Accounting module in read-only mode; or have full access to Manage it.

Learn More

This is everything you need to get started managing your accounting within ChMeetings. Please explore the other topics within our Accounting help section to learn more about how to work with each feature in detail.