Running a churchs finances is similar to running the finances of any organization, particularly in ensuring the accuracy of financial records. A sound accounting practice translates to a transparent and efficient operation, which in turn is a key ingredient to any organizations success. Thus, an extensive church accounting software is important for the smooth implementation of a churchs accounting system.

An extensive software offers complete features that can be used separately or at the same time. This software includes features that aid in fund accounting, check registry, budgeting, and payroll. And these features must be interconnected for a convenient recordkeeping. An accounting software should allow managing of different checking and savings accounts. In addition to that, the accounting software must enable users to make and print reports of the latest financial information.

Basic reports that should be covered by the software are the balance sheet, budget report, expense report, contribution statement, contribution/donation summary, fund balance, payroll checks, and reports on itemized transactions. Reports for tax reporting should be included in a comprehensive package as well. The software must be flexible such that reports can be customized. The same goes for making graphs and charts for presentation purposes.

Church officers or members are mostly inexperienced or untrained in accounting practices. So it is necessary for a church accounting software to be user-friendly for those who have little or no accounting background. The software should be simple and easy to use by any church member who has limited knowledge in using computers. The combination of various software features is useful in this case. How? For instance, when recording data in the check registry, these are automatically entered in related accounting categories. As a result, a user does not have to record the same financial data again. In addition, the software must allow users to perform majority of the commands in just one click.

A complete accounting software must include other features such as the ability to merge mails and transferring financial data to other software programs. And since large religious organizations own various offices or computers, the accounting software must provide multiple user support. This feature, aside from preventing processing delays, allows several church members to use the software simultaneously.

The latest comprehensive church accounting software also supports online back up. Traditional back up systems such as hard drives or burning information to disk take too much time to do and are prone to being lost, stolen, or corrupted. With online backup, data is stored in an offsite server. In the event of disaster like fire, flood, or crashing of the computers, data is not lost. Online backup is almost instantaneous which means that recovered data is almost always up to date. Recovery of data can also be done instantaneously, minimizing downtime so that the church can go back to running its operations as soon as possible.

Lastly, the provider of the accounting software should offer customer service and technical support. The software company should also be able to answer inquiries without any hassle through email, chat, or telephone.