Which Quicken Do We Need - for church budget & contributions (edit)

CBCEldo

We use Windows 10, and are a non-profit church setting up our accounting information. We need to establish a one year budget for under $50K, write checks, prepare/print monthly financial reports, and keep individual contribution records with a printed annual report for each donor.

Which Quicken would you recommend?

splasher

Not Quicken, it is meant to be PERSONAL FINANCIAL MANAGER and at its highest level, for a sole proprietor business/rental program. It doesn't handle keeping track of individual contributions naturally and to do so would require a lot of creative workarounds.

Surely, there are programs created specifically for church organizations.

NotACPA

Concur w/ @splasher

splasher

Not Quicken, it is meant to be PERSONAL FINANCIAL MANAGER and at its highest level, for a sole proprietor business/rental program. It doesn't handle keeping track of individual contributions naturally and to do so would require a lot of creative workarounds.

Surely, there are programs created specifically for church organizations.

NotACPA

Concur w/ @splasher

Matthew42

You need Quickbooks for the accounting work.

Church member management and donor records don't fit neatly into accounting workflows though. You can either track that on the side in excel spreadsheets (for a small nonprofit) or use a church management software solution like IconCMO, Breeze, Realm, ChurchTrac, OneChurch, Tithe.ly, SimpleChurch…. Note: some of these come with simplified accounting offerings for small organizations like yours - but you may be better off tracking donations in Excel and accounting with a desktop license for Quickbooks.

DocDJ

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20369190#Comment_20369190

Quicken Home & Business is NOT just "personal". See the keyword "BUSINESS" in the title. Also, there are MANY people who HAVE used it for a non-profit. It just doesn't have IRS 990 forms BUILT-IN (there might be other things missing, but people have used exporting to Excel to get those things done). We also looked at the trial version of QB Online and it DOES have 990, but none of the interfaces and reports are like the old non-profit desktop version (even though we tried the "desktop interface", to try to get it.) We spent HOURS trying to make it work with our custom reports and lists, but finally gave up in frustration. Of course, we couldn't take the plunge and upgrade to that version, just to test it and possibly lose all our desktop version capability.

Ps56k2

the point is - Quicken is aimed at "personal finance" -
and NOT designed for those special needs of ….

a non-profit church setting up our accounting information. We need to
establish a one year budget for under $50K, write checks, prepare/print
monthly financial reports, and keep individual contribution records with
a printed annual report for each donor.

Sure - you can force, fudge, and tweak anything to make it fit your special needs - but with how much effort …

jacobs

@DocDJ said: Quicken Home & Business is NOT just "personal". See the keyword "BUSINESS" in the title.

The "Home & Business" conveys that the normal personal finance management has been extended to those people who have a small business. Often this is people who run a small home-based business, or have real estate rental properties. But it's not a full-fledged business accounting program, and doesn't aspire to be.

As @Ps56k2 said above, people find ways to use Quicken to suit their needs. I used Quicken to keep the books for a small national non-profit organization — but I also used a FileMaker Pro database (the preeminent Mac database software) for generating invoices and tracking payments. I've also used Quicken to manage the books for my wife's small business, but again we used a separate FileMarker Pro database for times tracking and generating invoices. I think for the needs you stated, you would need some external database, or manually invoice and build contributor statements, as Quicken is not designed to do those things. Perhaps someone in your organization is familiar with Access (assuming you're on Windows) and can create a database to do these things — but you'll inevitably have some data you'd need to enter in both places.

DocDJ

Thanks for the extended information. I was mainly complaining about the statement that Q was ONLY for personal finances. I am familiar with Access, so I can build a database if needed. We currently use Excel with Word for many things, so we do have the tools to build what we need. We DID get the trial of the new QBO, set the interface as a "likeness" of the Desktop QB, but many of the things we use have been moved or renamed and we were really lost, trying to build a sample similar to our Desktop edition. Given that we don't use the full power of QB, and QB Desktop (compatible with Windows 11) for non-profits is no longer available on Techsoup, we are feel our money will be better spent on QHB. I 've used Quicken Deluxe for many years and feel comfortable with the belief I can help our office manager to set it up for what she needs.
PS. I appreciate your hint to use Access. It's a great program. Much easier to use (IMO) than MySql.