Introduction

Transitioning from QuickBooks to ChMeetings for church accounting can be an option if you are looking for a more church-specific solution. ChMeetings combines church management tools with financial management features, making it a feasible platform for churches seeking to simplify and streamline their accounting, as well as many other church operations. Here's a detailed guide on how to go through this transition.

1. Understand the Key Differences Between ChMeetings and Quickbooks

Before transitioning, it’s important to understand the fundamental differences between QuickBooks and ChMeetings.

QuickBooks is a fully-fledged accounting platform, mostly geared towards commercial organizations or businesses. In Quickbooks, you might use double-entry accounting to manage finances.
ChMeetings is a church management software (ChMS) that also includes accounting tools designed to meet the specific needs of churches. Our Accounting module uses single-entry accounting and focuses on fund accounting to track cash flow for different mission-specific purposes.

Read our comparison between Quickbooks and ChMeetings to learn more details.

2. Know the Difference Between Double Entry and Single-Entry Accounting

Another difference to understand is between single-entry and double-entry accounting.

Single-entry accounting is a system in which financial transactions are recorded once as either income or expense.
Double-entry accounting records transactions as debits and credits.

3. Prepare Your Data

The first step in any software transition is to ensure that your financial data is well-prepared for import into ChMeetings. Here's what you need to do:

Export Financial Data from QuickBooks: Export your financial records, such as income, expenses, and balance sheets, from QuickBooks. Ensure that all transactions are up-to-date and complete. Follow our Quickbooks Online or Quickbooks Desktop migration guide to get this done..
Gather Key Information: Alongside accounting data, gather any other information you have about donations, pledges, and funds to help better reflect your current data within ChMeetings.
Check for Data Completeness: Ensure all income and expense categories, as well as funds are accounted for, such as tithes, offerings, event revenues, and pledge campaigns.

4. Set Up ChMeetings

After preparing your data, it’s time to set up ChMeetings to handle your accounting moving forward:

Configure Church Settings: Make sure you customize your church profile, including your organizational structure, and donation settings.
Configure ChMeetings Accounting: Follow our Accounting Setup Guide to configure the section and get it ready to manage your finances.
Import People and Giving Data into ChMeetings: Now you need to import your financial data into your ChMeetings account. We created a dedicated tool so you can easily Import People and Giving from Quickbooks.
Configure Import Rules, then Import Transactions into ChMeetings. Your transactions should already be categorized by Quickbooks, so you are not required to set up rules before your first import, but such rules are important for future operations as they automatically assign transactions to categories, funds, or payees, they can add notes or remove transactions from imports, depending on your specified criteria.

💡Pro Tip

You can skip Steps 3 and 4 with our free data transfer service. All our paid plans come with complimentary data migration from external systems, which means our team does most of the heavy lifting for you. We recommend this especially when you migrate from Quickbooks.

5. Test and Review

Before fully committing to ChMeetings as your primary accounting tool, run a test with your financial data. This may be a tedious, manual task, but it’s well worth it to make sure you’re starting on the right track

Review Entries: Check that all donations, expenses, and revenue are recorded correctly. You can do this from your Accounts section, or by using the Transactions area which works across all your accounts.
Reconcile Accounts: Perform a bank reconciliation to make sure everything matches your church’s bank statements.
Verify Reports: Generate various financial reports to ensure that the system is working properly.

6. Train Your Team

ChMeetings is designed to be user-friendly, so training your team should not be hard; especially coming from Quickbooks.

ChMeetings offers tutorials and support resources that can help your team get acquainted with the new system. You may want to offer your finance team training on how to input data, manage donations, and generate reports. Our Help Center provides comprehensive guidance on all you need to know to work with ChMeetings successfully.

7. Transition Regular Operations

Once you are confident that ChMeetings is set up correctly and all financial data is accounted for, you can transition your ongoing operations to the new system. This means you must:

Link Your Bank Account: In ChMeetings, you can link your bank account to be able to automatically import transactions without having to enter them manually. This saves you time and ensures accuracy, as transaction data comes straight from your bank. You can learn more about how to do this in our guide on Linking With Your Bank.
Enter New Donations and Pledges: Begin entering new contributions and pledges directly into ChMeetings rather than QuickBooks.
Set Up Online Giving within ChMeetings so people can contribute to your church online. This means you’ll also need to add your payment processor (PayPal, Stripe, or Paystack) to collect online donations.
Perform Ongoing Financial Tracking: Use ChMeetings for monthly income/expense tracking, budgeting, fund management, account reconciliation, and financial reports moving forward.

8. Seek Ongoing Support

If you encounter any issues or need help during the transition, ChMeetings offers free and reliable support to guide you through the process. Contact us anytime and we’d be glad to help.