Best Practice: The Problem of Allocating Online Giving Deposits

(Please forward to your financial admin).

When someone gives online or registers for anything requiring a payment, their donation (payment) posts immediately to their giving (or registration) record.  Two days later  that donation (registration) is deposited into the church's checking account as a single amount.  Because the date of the donation credited to the donor isn't the same as the date of the deposit made by the payment processor it is a challenge to reconcile deposits with donations for accounting software data entry.  It requires a major time investment for financial staff ... unless they use Churchteams.

We first became aware of this problem shortly after we released onling giving many years ago and built our ONLINE DEPOSIT RECONCILIATION report.  It solved the problem for financial admins but we didn't realize until recently how unique this report is in the market.  We wrongly assumed most ChMS had a solution until a friend planning to move from one of the best known ChMS out there shared with us how significant this report really is.

Here's how simple it is in Churchteams.

1. You have an online giving deposit you want to reconcile or allocate to the proper designation in your accounting software for a given day.
2. Go to Reports / Financial and click to run the ONLINE DEPOSIT RECONCILIATION report that covers the day of the deposit or any date range.  I generally recommend the day before and after as well since occasionally a deposit is made a day early or a day later than anticipated in the report.
3. Double-check the deposit amount on the report compared to the actual deposit.  Most of the time it's the same.  If not review deposits from the day before or after to see if something might have slipped through differently than expected.
4. Allocate funds to the proper designations in your accounting software.

Here's an example of an ONLINE DEPOSIT RECONCILIATION report from an actual church but with names scrubbed.  Funds can also be further designated by campus for multi-campus churches.

Here's a close up of the summary, bottom left.

All your bookkeeper needs to do is enter these amounts as income into the accounting software.  That's it!