Creating and Editing Categories
Categories are used to identify or designate how money is received or spent. Categories are used for labeling donations (on the Giving Screen), but they are also used for categorizing transactions and creating budgets (on the Accounting Screen).
If you're switching from Quickbooks or another church bookkeeping software that uses a "chart of accounts", you will convert many of those over to Categories in ChurchTrac.
Creating Categories
You can view, edit and create categories by selecting "Categories" on the Accounting Screen's toolbar.
Step 1: Add a New Category
To create a new Category, select the "Add" button and name the category.
Step 2: Customize Your Categories: Income and Expense
To accurately reflect your financial activity, you will need to create separate categories for both income and expenses, name them accordingly, and specify their type as Income or Expense.
Examples of Categories: Children's Minstry
In the following example, we will create both income and expense categories, along with subcategories, for Children's Ministry. This approach can be applied to organize all of your categories as needed.
Income Category
Create an Income Category called "Children's Ministry Income" and designate it as an Income Category.
Expense Category
Create an Expense Category called "Children's Ministry Expense" and designate it as an Expense Category.
Subcategories
Regarding subcategories, you could then create "Awana Expense" and "VBS Expense" subcategories to better track your expenses. To make a category a subcategory of another, simply select the parent category from the "Subcategory of" selection box.
Editing Categories
There are occasions when you may need to rearrange your categories, edit the name or status of a category, or delete a category.
Editing Category Name
Select the name of a Category or Subcategory to begin editing it. The edit window will appear to the right. You can make changes to any of the fields in that window at any time.
Deleting Categories
If you need to delete a category, ChurchTrac will check to determine if that category is in use, either on the Giving Screen or the Accounting Screen. If there are donations or transactions that utilize the category, ChurchTrac will prompt you to reassign the money in that category to another category.
Rearrange Categories
Categories can be moved into any order you prefer. To change your Category order, simply click the up/down arrows to the right of the Category name and drag it to whatever position you prefer. Subcategories can be sorted by assigning a sequential Category Number in the order you want the subcategories to appear under the parent.
Pro Tips
To avoid confusion with ChurchTrac Funds, we recommend that you do not use the word 'Fund' when naming your Category.
You can't have subcategories of subcategories. Only one level of nesting is used in ChurchTrac.
If you don’t need to track detailed income and expense records, you can simplify the process. For example, in the case of a love offering, the money is collected, counted, and a check is immediately written from the love offering category to the recipient. This effectively zeroes out the category. In this case, you'll just need to create an "income" category.
Don't let the Categories get cluttered. Keep them organized by grouping some together under a parent Category. Also, churches tend to accumulate Categories that were necessary in the past but are not needed anymore. Consider reviewing your Categories at least once a year and removing some that haven't been used in a long time.
Watch our Pro Tip video to learn more about managing your Categories and Funds for easy accounting.