Contents

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

We will be working with five key terms: Transaction, Account, Category, Subcategory, and Fund. We will then explore how these concepts relate to each other within ChMeetings Accounting.

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:

Expense/Charge – This means that you add such a transaction for situations when money goes out of your account, such as when you transfer money, make a payment or get charged for something automatically, including using a debit card attached to your account, as the case may be.
Income/Deposit – This means that you add such a transaction when you receive money into your account, through any means including receiving transfers from contributors, receiving payments for any paid services you offer, money coming from grants, or cash you deposit into the church account.
Transfer Transactions are used when you want to transfer money between Financial 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/Subcategories.

Based on whether you own or owe the money they contain, 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.

Based on whether the Account is only used for accounting purposes or it is an actual bank account, there are also two types of Accounts:

Financial Accounts are exclusively an accounting tool that helps you track transactions taking place through your bank or in cash. They do not hold money, they just help you track it across Funds and income or expense categories.
Bank Accounts hold your money and are where your financial transactions take place. These accounts are managed through your bank but can be linked to ChMeetings Financial Accounts to track corresponding financial activity. You will use a bank account in ChMeetings only if you link it, but you are not required to, since you can import transactions manually, too. Bank account linking is only available in the US.

Subcategory

The Subcategory fulfills the same role as a Category, providing the additional benefit of better organization of financial transactions. Rather than categorizing transactions more generally, you can drill down into your types of transactions and add subcategories for more narrow domains. For example, if you have a category for General Expenses, you can create subcategories for it to represent, for instance: Administrative Expenses, Maintenance Expenses, Staffing Expenses, etc.

Subcategories also behave the same way as Categories, and you can always find them in all Category dropdown lists when you want to associate them to transactions.

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/Subcategories.

Important Notes

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.
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 where you want to allocate money for 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

Subcategory: Book Acquisition (Expense), Research Service (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/Subcategories relate to each other and work together: