QuickBooks is a popular choice for small businesses, but is it the best fit for your church?
Consider this comparison:
FlockBase was designed by CPAs who understand that churches have different accounting and management needs than small businesses. In addition to tracking church expenses and generating financial reports, our program allows you to easily track donations to both restricted and unrestricted funds, generate year-end contribution letters, and even accept online contributions that are automatically tracked in the system. FlockBase also allows you to do things like track member information and send texts and emails to your congregation.
Because FlockBase was designed by CPAs with extensive church accounting backgrounds, you can see that it has numerous features that are specifically designed for small churches. With FlockBase, you simply enter your member’s contributions, group them into a deposit, and post the deposit to your check register. From there, you are ready to easily print high quality, church specific, IRS compliant, year-end contribution receipts to your members. Trying to print IRS compliant contribution receipts from QuickBooks is quite challenging.
Some churches use a separate membership and contribution tracking software and then manually enter deposits into QuickBooks for their accounting. Obviously not only is this patch-work approach a clear duplication of effort, it also creates a lot of opportunities for errors. With FlockBase, contribution tracking, the check register, and the general ledger are all fully integrated, saving you time and effort, and decreasing opportunities for errors.
FlockBase Cloud Pro allows you to seamlessly send group texts and professional looking emails to selected groups of your church members. Try doing that in QuickBooks.
If your church has restricted funds (contributions that have been designated for a restricted purpose), tracking those restricted funds in QuickBooks is very difficult. After a while, most churches who try to use QuickBooks to track their restricted funds realize that the restricted funds balance in their books does not match the actual restricted funds bank balances. That is a big problem which could have serious congregational and legal consequences. Because FlockBase was fundamentally designed to track restricted funds, you will always know how much of your church’s money belongs to each restricted fund.
Yes, QuickBooks offers next-business-day direct deposit for paychecks, while FlockBase offers four-business-day direct deposit for paychecks. QuickBooks calculates state income tax withholding on paychecks. FlockBase allows you to enter state income tax withholding on paychecks, but does not calculate it. QuickBooks will file your payroll reports electronically. FlockBase prints W-2s/W-3s and 1099s on pre-printed forms, but does not file payroll tax reports electronically. QuickBooks tracks A/R and A/P and downloads bank transactions, while FlockBase does not. So, if these advanced features are important to your church, and if they are worth the extra $207 per month, and if the church-specific FlockBase features are not that important to you, then maybe your church should use QuickBooks.
For purposes of daily accounting entries, FlockBase and QuickBooks are very similar. Both of them have a chart of accounts and check/credit card registers. Entering a check or credit card into either system is virtually identical. Likewise, reconciling a bank or credit card statement is very similar. Because of FlockBase’s fully-integrated contribution module, making a deposit of members’ contributions is likely easier in FlockBase than it is in QuickBooks.
If the advanced features that QuickBooks offers are not worth the extra cost to your church and you are considering trying a system built specifically for small churches, FlockBase offers a fully integrated, affordable, easy-to-use program that we believe could help your church. Start a free trial, request a free demo, or just give us a call at (877) 883-5625 today!
Ready to try the affordable church software solution?
Two weeks free | No card required | Sample data available
