I just wrote a new post called The Cost of Using QuickBooks for Your Church. I tried to outline all the costs that you might run into, but each church is different so I may have missed something. Thanks for the great question and let me know if my post didn’t answer all of your questions.

Best!

Excellent post. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I don’t have time to answer all your questions right now (I have a regular day job, two babies, and I volunteer at my church 15 hours each week). That being said, I’m going to cram in some time this week to answer all of these questions. I want to give a detailed explanation so it might take me an hour or two to put all the information together. My goal will be to clearly illustrate the costs of all the competing church accounting software programs out there right now.

Anyways, sorry I can’t answer right away! It should be up by the end of this week though (hope you can wait).

Best

I would also like to know if QB Premiere has the payroll functionality built in so that a church can actually do their own payroll without having to use the online payroll option from Intuit.

And related to the last question if you can do your own payroll, to get the new tax tables etc each year, do you have to buy the new edition of QB Premiere or is there an upgrade each year for the new tax tables? If an upgrade can you tell me about what does that upgrade cost?

I am asking this on the ACS page because my churh has ACS and there are some members that want us to change packages due to the monthly maintenance cost of ACS, but if we are looking at approximately $150 a month for the Servant Keeper and QB Premiere then I would question the reasonableness of making a switch for us purely on a financial basis.

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

Thanks for sharing your comments. I’m starting to think that the Servant Keeper/ QuickBooks combination is going to be hard to beat.

We are, however looking at Servant Keeper and Quickbooks because of budget. ACS for all of the above, monthly maintenance runs about $350/month for our church of 250. Report features are great. Servant Keeper and Quickbooks looks like it will fun us about $150/month average.

ACS can be learned by the lay person BUT that lay person needs to have a logical-type, data-processing type of mind.

Servant Keeper appears to have all the bells and whistles that I’d like ACS to have. Very easy to learn. Very easy to set up groups. ACS has these capabilities with more steps.

I’d recommend ACS and have done so, but we may be switching to Quickbooks/Servant Keeper for budget reasons and Volunteer train-ability reasons.

I apologize that the right person from our organization has not contacted you. If you are a client calling for support, the best solution is to call 800-669-2509 or complete a “contact request” from the client portal: http://www.acstechnologies.com/clientportal

You can also email me directly at steve.cumbia@acstechnologies.com I’ll do my best to answer any questions you have or be sure to get you to the right person.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about ACS, but over the past few months I’ve been getting more negative reports. I’ve tried calling them several times to talk with Steve Cumbia and other managers over there, but I keep getting sent to voice mails (we’re not talking once here, we’re talking several times and it has been months now since I’ve communicated with them). I’ve tried sending emails and those are getting ignored as well. I’ve talked with other users and they are having a similar problem (talking with a sales rep and then getting the voice mail when they are transferred to someone who can actually help them). I’ll probably have a post about it in the near future, but for now I’m starting to recommend people to stay away from ACS.

Best,

Nate