I get a lot of excellent questions about using QuickBooks for church accounting purposes on my website. One of the most recent questions I received was about the true monthly cost of using QuickBooks. This really got me thinking and I decided to put together a document that hopefully clearly outlines the cost of using QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit Edition.

Background Information

Cost of QuickBooks Premier Non-Profit Edition 2012 (if you purchase it through a link on my website): $320

Cost of QuickBooks Monthly Payroll Program

• Basic: $108 a year
• Enhanced:  $236 a year

Let’s do some math.

*It is usually considered best practice to upgrade QuickBooks every three years, so we’ll look at this from a three year perspective.

Cost of QuickBooks Nonprofit ($320) divided by 36 months = $8.89 a month

Cost of Basic Payroll ($108 * 3years) divided by 36 months = $9 a month

Cost of Enhanced Payroll ($236 * 3years) divided by 36 months = $19.67 a month

If you want to go really cheap, you can do the payroll yourself without the extra software. That means you can get your church accounting done for $9 a month! That’s pretty hard to beat, especially considering the quality of the QuickBooks software.

Add the basic payroll and you’re looking at about $18 a month (with the enhanced payroll you’re looking at about $29 a month).

$30 a month to get the most popular accounting software in the world (along with payroll) is a pretty deadly combination.

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QuickBooks will take care of all of your accounting needs, but what about managing your members? Some churches operate without church management software, but many churches like having some software that will keep all of their member information organized.

Most of the church management packages out there nowadays will interact quite well with QuickBooks, but the one that seems to work best with QuickBooks is Servant Keeper by Servant PC.

Servant Keeper Costs $499. According to a frequently asked question on their website, you have to upgrade about every 3-5 years. We’ll use three years just to keep things simple.

The cost of Servant Keeper $499 divided by 36 months = $13.86 a month

This means that if you were going with the most expensive QuickBooks package and Servant Keeper you would be looking at $43 a month. Note that this doesn’t include any extras (which you may or may not need).

If you wanted to go really cheap and drop payroll, you could do your church management and accounting for $24 a month. This is for the top of the line accounting software that over 80 percent of all churches are using. Not a bad deal in my opinion.

Hopefully this helps shed some light into what the costs of QuickBooks are. Remember that you get 20 percent off any QuickBooks purchases if you click through to QuickBooks on one of the links on my site.

Happy Accounting!