Will Quickbooks or Quickbooks Pro automatically keep running balances on general ledgers

by Kathy Butler
(Corning, AR)

You suggested that since I have a lot of expense accounts that I should purchase double entry such as Quckbooks.

I noticed on your spreadsheets GL that when you enter income or expenses it adjusts the balances accordingly and even carries it over to the next report pages. That way you are not entering income/expense on GL and then totaling manually after each entry.

Then you also don't have to go to the report pages and re-enter everything you did in the GL. It is automatic and carries over to each page on your spreadsheets only having to enter the information once.

That is exactly what I am looking for, enter the information 1 time in GL and have it automatically adjust the balances and carry it over to the other reports. The only problem I have is that I have more than 10 expense accounts. Will the Quickbooks program you are suggesting, do what your spreadsheets do?

Enter an item 1 time in GL and it carry over to the reports you need to print? I guess I need to know if anyone has worked with any accounting products that have that capability. I will still use membership plus to track and print contribution reports for year-end giving.

I need a General Leger to enter information in and have it carry over to an income/expense report like your spreadsheets do, with the ability to add about 20 expense individual expenses.

Thanks for anyone who can help.

Vickey's Reply

Yes. QuickBooks will keep a running total on your different funds and much more. It will also record and track your assets and liabilities which my single entry spreadsheets cannot do.
(Updated:2-22-13 I have added 10 more expense accounts in the accounting spreadsheets for a total of 20 expense account in the multi-fund workbook.)

There are some good church accounting software available that will do the same thing. Several are discussed on this page. However, QuickBooks is about the cheapest of all of them. Only thing is--it is not programmed exclusively for churches, so you have to do some modifications to make it work for churches.

In my opinion the easy fix is to turn on the class tracking in QuickBooks. There are several more things you can do to make it work better for your church. They are discussed in detail in this book: Running QuickBooks in Nonprofits