Church Accounting Using Gnucash - 5: Creating and Account for each Parish Member

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The church runs because of the voluntary contributions of its members. Though “there is no fixed fee for membership. However all members are under Christian obligation to extend financial aid for the needs of the parish and the Church”.

Contributions are collected normally under these various heads

1. Annual “Subscription” i.e. Membership charges 
2. Tithe” charges. collected during the month of November. Members are requested to contribute a tenth of their monthly income 
3. “One Day Income” collected during the month of January. Members are requested to contribute an average of what they earn in a day.

Though the contributions are voluntary, it is required that the contributions received be published in the annual report. This report should be easily produced from the accounting tool used.

For this, each contributing member of the parish, should have an entity created in GnuCash.

GnuCash’s “Business” features can conceivably be used for this purpose. Each member can be represented as a “Customer”, whose payments are the contributions made.

But this approach was not pursued by me- A couple of reasons – Customers do not appear in the GnuCash Chart of Accounts – the list of customers defined are visible only when the “Customer Report” is run (Reports - > Business -> Customer Report).  Also, I could not see any way of creating year end reports, listing the contributions made by each member.

The approach used by me is the creation of individual accounts for each member under the parent account “Assets -> Current Assets -> Debtors”. Each contribution made by the member will be recorded as two transactions made from the member account. The figure below is an extract of a subscription transaction from a members account. (common transactions like this will be covered in more detail in later posts.)



At the end of the year, a simple account transaction report taken from the “Debtors” parent account, will enable the easy creation of contribution reports at the end of the year. (This will be covered in more detail in later posts)

The details of the the total Income collected, under each category of contribution will be available in that particular contributions account, under the "Income" parent accounts. (for instance,  "Income:Members Yearly Contributions:Subscription".  At the end of the year, this will be reported in the in the Income Statement Report.

The account details of each such account should also contain the Edavaka Register (Church Register) Number, and the complete address and phone number. One sample account has been left in the attached chart of accounts, that of yours truly’s

To create the accounts for all members easily reliably and repeatedly, I have written a macro in the church membership excel, which will automate the process to a large extent. A link to the extract of our Parish members list with the embedded macro is given below.

Dropbox: Church Register For Gnucash Import.xlsm

GitHub:   Church Register For Gnucash Import.xlsm

You can edit the names of the columns, and make other changes, by changing the values of columns B and E in the "Configurations" sheet, to suit your requirements

Open the excel. Make sure that macros can run (adjust security settings etc.), and run the macro “ExportToXML”. A file will be created in the folder named “acctchrt_Debtors.gnucash-xea”.  (This name is also configurable by changing the parameters in the "Configuration" sheet)  Copy this file to the folder <GnuCash install folder>\share\GnuCash\accounts\C or the correct Locale folder under folder <GnuCash install folder>\share\GnuCash \accounts. (In Windows 7, the folder will be “C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuCash\share\GnuCash\accounts\C” if GnuCash was installed using the default settings)

Fire up GnuCash. Go to Actions -> New Accounts Hierarchy

Click on the “forward” button in the “New Account Hierarchy” window that comes up.

Choose your currency, and press the forward button

A new account category named “Church Members” will now be visible in the “New Account Hierarchy Setup” window. Check the check box to the left of this to select it, and press the “forward” button.

The screen “Setup Selected accounts” will come up. Note that in this window, existing accounts will be labeled as such. These accounts will not be created.

Press forward, in the “Finish Account Setup” screen to create all the new accounts.

To modify existing accounts, for instance to update the address details of an account, rename that account in GnuCash (by, for example, adding a short suffix at the end of the account name) and run the above steps. After this, merge the two accounts using the procedure to “Transfer all transactions of an account into another account” - which will be detailed in a later post.

The macro is password protected. If anyone is interested in adding new features, please let me know through the comments box below. and I will try to oblige, time permitting. If you want the password.... Ask - and it shall be given....

UPDATE. 18 March 13:
I have updated the sheet, and together with other improvements, I have given the password for the code in the sheet itself - If Gnucash can be free and open source, this small effort of mine should also be free and opensource...   If you find it useful, let me know so, and give me some constructive feedback through the comments below.

UPDATE: 01 June 13
Updated the Macro in the Excel.  Also updated the password to open the code.  It is

Matthew 22:36

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