The Accounting and Contributions modules in ChMeetings are completely separate.
When a contribution is made online, the payment is processed by your selected payment gateway. When it’s made in person, your church processes the payment. Based on your setup and practices, the money will be transferred or deposited to the bank within a specific period, such as every week or when reaching a certain amount. This is when you get a Payout to your bank account.
So, individual giving transactions don’t go straight to your bank account. They go to your payment processor first or you hold the cash for a while until depositing it. When you get a Payout from your payment processor or make a deposit, your bank account is credited with the total received income, usually through a single transaction summing up a batch of contribution payments. Once the Payout occurs, you can add the corresponding transaction to your accounting.
The only time when your giving transactions may go straight to your bank account is when you accept direct transfers. In this scenario, a contributor directly transfers the money to your church bank account. You would add this transfer as a Contribution to ChMeetings. The direct payment to your account must then be manually added or imported into your accounting, based on your bank statement. In this case, automatically adding the contribution to your accounting is technically feasible to implement within ChMeetings. However; this increases the risk of duplicating records; especially when importing multiple transactions from your bank. In such cases, it can be difficult and time-consuming to reconcile accounting system records with bank exports; so the cautious approach is to work exclusively based on your bank exports or statements without any transactions added by the accounting system.
Exceptions
Sometimes, your contributions may not go through your bank. In these cases, you may want to deposit contributions to your accounting. To achieve this, we have developed the Deposits feature, which pulls contributions and adds them as new Income transactions to your desired Account, Category, and Fund.