What makes church accounting so different? Well the main difference is fund accounting. When money is donated or given to a church, the church needs to keep track of it a bit differently than a business would. First of all, a church needs to keep track of member donations for tax purposes. In addition, churches need to keep track of the type of donations in different “funds” or accounts. For example a member may specify that a certain donation is supposed to be used for a specific purpose (this could be for a new church, for missionary purposes, or for an upcoming service project). The church accountants and leaders have to keep track of where the money will be going (to do this, they use funds).

QuickBooks For Churches

Interestingly enough many people don’t know that the most popular church accounting software is QuickBooks. Most new church accountants have heard of QuickBooks before, but they don’t know that Intuit (the makers of QuickBooks) makes a special nonprofit version that works great for churches. You can read more about it in my QuickBooks for Churches review.

Church Management Software

Some people don’t really see a difference between accounting software for churches and church management software. At first, I didn’t really see a difference either, but now that I’ve been writing about and reviewing this software for several years I see some key differences. Management software is designed to manage information about your members. For example you may want to know membership attendance for religious meetings. You’ll probably also need to track personal contact information for each of your members. Sure you could probably keep all of this information in a spreadsheet, but there is software out there that will do all of the hard work for you. Most software will allow church leaders to have a picture of the individual along with all the pertinent information all on one screen. This software can make being a church leader much more manageable.

Example of Church Management Software

Free Church Accounting Software

The old saying goes that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Well that’s only partially true. The truth is there are some free church accounting software packages available. However, they aren’t as sophisticated or user-friendly as the software that you can purchase. In addition, they may not have all the requirements to meet your needs.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was some free church accounting software out there to help you manage your church’s funds and taxes? Well, as always, there are several websites out there claiming to give away church accounting software. To hopefully save you some time, we’ve put together this list of supposedly free church software. And to save you some money, we have identified what the true cost of the software is.

As is always our policy, we do not endorse one church software system over another. We simply want to provide you information.

• Sunday Software

First of all, if you started the journey for your church’s accounting system by typing into google “free church accounting software” then you likely ended up on a sub-domain of sundaysoftware.com. SundaySoftware does not make accounting software; however, they do provide links to other sites that do.

• Churchtrac.com

The good new about churchtrac is that they actually do offer free church accounting software. The bad news is that the software is only for small churches. After some investigation we learned that small churches means less than 100 people.

**** Update July 15, 2010***

• Gnucash.org

Gnucash offers some software that could be used as free church management software. This software was originally built for businesses which may mean that you need to tweak it a bit for it to work for your church. It is open source and is considered by many as the best free accounting package available.

****Update April 26 2010 ****

Vickey over at freechurchaccounting.com has some free spreadsheets that can be an excellent solution for those of you looking for a completely free way to perform your churches’ accounting.

Synopsis
If the church that your managing has less than 100 people or if you don’t mind having some advertisements floating around the screen then you just may be able to find some free church accounting software. Otherwise, it appears you will have to fork out the cash to get the software.

**** Update June 19, 2009 ****

After thinking more about this topic, I have a few other recommendations if you are looking to save some money. If your church’s accounting systems is relatively simple then you could probably get away with using Microsoft Excel. Although most thoroughbred accountants will scoff at you for not using some sort of specialized software. And if you want to go completely free, then why not try Open Office. I know a lot of Non-Profits actually use this software and it does a decent job. Although it might take you a while to get over some of the annoying little quirks.