ChurchTrac News and Tips

Feb 22 Seven Strategies for Ensuring Financial Integrity in Your Church From time to time, our staff will write articles that address church related issues that go beyond just ChurchTrac Software.  These can be found under the Knowledge Center caption on the Knowledgebase webpage.  So far there are articles on questions to ask before buying a computer, creating a safe nursery and preschool ministry, and my favorite saving money without going extreme. We’ve recently added another article entitled “Seven Strategies for Ensuring Financial Integrity in Your Church.”  Most of us would never dream of stealing – especially from the church.  After all, isn’t that one of the Big 10 – “Thou shalt not steal”?  But unfortunately, it does happen more than we realize – even in the church. This newest article makes the case for establishing safeguards and accountability in churches LARGE and SMALL when it comes to handling money.  It also outlines Seven strategies for ensuring financial integrity in your church.  Check it out before you find your church dealing with a problem of its own.   Feb 4 ChurchTrac Update and Important News Hi Everyone, My name is Byron, and I’m the head programmer for ChurchTrac. I want to address several topics that should be of interest to most of our users. In particular, I want to share what’s included in our most recent program update, plus the reasoning behind our decision to change what happens when transactions are reconciled on the Accounting screen. First though, many of you have reported permission-related errors to us for many months (Error 3051 is the main one). These errors seem to occur randomly on some computers, but not all computers, and not all the time. As you can imagine, the random nature of this error makes it the most difficult kind of problem to resolve. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that we never able to duplicate the errors on any of our test computers. After many months of frustration (both from users and programmers), we’ve finally discovered the apparent cause of these errors…Backup Software. For those of you who use services like Carbonite, McAfee Online Backup, Norton Online Backup, or a backup system with an external hard drive, these errors may have affected you. (And since we don’t run any backup software on our test computers, it explains why we were never able to duplicate the issue). Here’s a simple explanation of what happens. Most backup software runs in the background, constantly looking for new or modified files to back up. When ChurchTrac opens a database file for processing, it may open and close that database file many hundreds of times per second as it is performing various operations. However, the backup software will frequently kick in to begin backing up the “modified” file, even while ChurchTrac is still processing and manipulating data in that file. Since ChurchTrac cannot perform operations on a file if another application is accessing it, ChurchTrac throws a permission related error, like: “Could not write data to the file…it is already in use by another process.” We’ll have a new knowledgebase article up shortly that will fully address this issue and give you some steps to resolve this problem on your computers that use backup software. And now let’s talk about the Reconciliation issue that many of you have written us about. On one side, we have users who want the ability to prevent users from making changes to transactions that have been reconciled. On the other hand, there are those who question why would change it to make it more restrictive. Obviously, regardless of which approach we take someone will be unhappy. But why the change? Most of us would never dream of stealing–especially from a church. However, it happens all the time. In fact, just a few weeks ago a church secretary here in Jacksonville, FL was arrested for stealing over a hundred thousand dollars from the church where she worked. She did this by stealing a little bit at a time over a period of several years. Whenever your accounting software makes it easy to “cover your tracks” by changing historical or finalized data, then it is easy to get away with this. Obviously, there also needs to be oversight and accountability in your church for everyone who handles money, but the software you use should not be part of the security problem. So with that said, from this point forward any transaction marked as Cleared or Reconciled will not be editable, except for the fact you can change the category of a reconciled transaction. With good accounting practices in mind, you should never be able to change the amount or payees on “finalized” entries. In an effort to compromise, we’ve re-enabled the ability to manually check off an individual transaction as reconciled with the latest update. We do recommend, however, that you use the Reconcile screen to mark transactions cleared instead of manually checking them as cleared. The Reconcile screen in ChurchTrac allows you to quickly check off all the transactions on your bank statement and print a reconciliation report. There’s more information on how to reconcile your account in this knowledgebase article. In addition to re-enabling the ability to manually check off transactions as being cleared, the latest update also includes the following: ChurchTrac will now display a prompt if it detects software installed on your computer that is known to conflict with ChurchTrac’s processes (like backup software) Significant updates under the hood to help minimize permission-related issues. In fact, there’s several dozen things we tweaked or changed to help make the application work better. Fixed a problem where some valid unlock codes would not work Also, if you use an Encrypted data file, we’ve had to temporarily disable this feature in this update. If you want to continue using an encrypted data file, do not install this update until we’ve had the opportunity to re-enable this feature. This should affect less than 1 percent of users. After installing this update you may also notice that some of your shortcuts no longer work. If that’s the case, delete the shortcuts, then try reinstalling the update again. This is caused by a bug in the installer application we use that became apparent when we relocated some of the program files to a new location. If you have any questions about the changes we’ve made or the content of this article, please feel free to contact us. Sincerely, Byron   Jan 30 Trac Tip – Memorized Payees Looking for a faster way to print payroll checks and other recurring checks?  ChurchTrac has a feature that can help you do just that.  The Memorized Payee feature allows you to create your own list of regular payees, such as employees or the lawn maintenance company, that you pay the same amount each time.  In addition to their name and the amount, you can even designate the category or even multiple categories that the money should come from.  For example, for your pastor you can designate the amount coming from salary and the amount coming from housing. A second way you can “memorize” your payee information is to enter the payee, amount, and categories onto your Accounting Register.  Then double click the entry.  ChurchTrac will automatically “memorize” the information and take you to the Memorized Payee page to add any additional information, such as mailing address.  You can also make changes to the amount or other information on this screen. Using this feature you can enter those regular bills with just a click and save you time for other more important ministries. Check out our Memorized Payee article for more set-by-step instructions. Jan 20 ChurchTrac Updated to version 8.700 This latest update fixed a series of errors reported by users, made some other “under the hood” fixes, and relocated some program files.  These might not sound significant, but they will bring great improvement to how smoothly ChurchTrac runs.  So don’t forget to update! Jan 5 Trac Tip – Contribution Report Tips January is here and that means it is time for printing your 2011 Contribution Statements for your donors’ tax records.  I want to start by answering a question that we have been receiving lately regarding these end of year statements. Why don’t some of the contributions show up on my Contribution Reports? The Contributor must be assigned to a family.  If not, their contributions will not show up on a Contributions Statement.  To check this, go to the People Screen and click on the person’s name.  Under the “General Information Tab” you will need to click on the “Assign to Family” field and select a family to assign them to or click the button at the bottom of the screen that says “Click here to automatically create a new family for this individual.”  OR On the Contributions screen, the “tax deductible” box must be checked next to the entry in order for it to appear on the Contributions Statement. Here are a few other questions we have answered in the past.  Click on the link to find the answer. How do I merge family members to print just one Contribution statement per family? How do I print just one Contribution statement without having to print them all? A few other tips: Make sure you have the correct date range 1/1/2011 to 12/31/2011 set before you print your Contribution statements. You do not have to erase your contributions or any other records from ChurchTrac to prepare for the next year.  When you want to view or print a report, simply change the date range to reflect the year or date range you want to track.  That way you can look at your 2012 Contribution records, Attendance records, etc. without losing your prior year’s history. For additional help check out our knowledgebase article on Using the Contributions Screen. Dec 31 ChurchTrac 8 Updated to Version 8.650.111231 A new program update is now available for download. This update fixed an issue on the Budget screen which caused Account names to be show in the Budget item selection boxes. It also fixed an issue when Categories and Subcategories might not synchronize correctly. Inactive names have been moved to the bottom of the list in selection boxes on the Contribution screen. A few other tweaks were also applied to increase start up speed and deal with permission-related errors. Dec 27 ChurchTrac Updates To Version 8.646 A new ChurchTrac 8 program update is now available from the ChurchTrac website. This updates includes several fixes to issues, including contribution screen sorting issues that were first seen after installing the previous update. This update also includes several “under the hood” updates designed to prevent permission-related errors that some users experience. ChurchTrac will now also prompt the user if it detects a permission issue when starting the program. Dec 16 New ChurchTrac Forums Page We have just set up a Forum on our Facebook page.  We want to give you, our ChurchTrac users, an opportunity to discuss topics, share ideas, and ask questions of one another.  This will also be beneficial for our prospective customers to be able to hear how you like and use ChurchTrac.  I hope it will be a lot of fun. To access the forums page, go to our Facebook page and click on “Forum” on the left side of our profile page.  We are just beginning, so help us out by being the first to post. Remember, if you have questions about specific ChurchTrac functions go to our Knowledgebase page on the website for video tutorials and articles on how to use ChurchTrac. Dec 15 New Program Update – Dec. 15, 2011 I know you feel like you just updated, but this is a new one.  Here are some of the new upgrades it contains. Pledge Report modified to fit into a #10 envelope The position of check elements can now be customized Several other fixes and minor updates Once again installing these updates will often fix any problems you may be experiencing with your ChurchTrac software. Dec 12 Trac Tip – Merging Family Giving for Contribution Reports ChurchTrac’s latest program updated included a new feature I wanted to tell you more about.  In the past, you have had the option on the Utilities menu to print the family name on top of each contribution report.  However, if you assigned contributions to both the husband and the wife, the contributions were not merged so the reports would still print separately.  At the time we recommended that you assign all contributions to one person in the family, perhaps the husband, if you only wanted one report to print per family. Now you have the option to manage your contribution statements even easier.  On the Utilities menu, click on the “Report Settings” option in the white box.  The selection box now says “Merge contributions from family members and only display one Contribution Report per family.”  This will allow all of the money given by all members of the family — husband, wife, kids — to be merged into one report. Be careful when choosing this option, however, because some husbands and wives choose to file their taxes separately, rather than jointly.  If that is the case, you can simply unclick this option and print their itemized contribution reports separately.