I have tried to create a customer transaction report, but no report appears. I enter the date range, and then nothing? I have created several customers, and have entered receipts from them for a couple of months. Am I missing a simple step?
Background:
I am considering using manager as bookkeeping software for our small church. I intended to call each of the donors or givers customers and enter their donations as receipts. This worked fine, but I need to create a summary of donations by donor at the end of the year. I entered the report menu and found the customer transaction report. If there is a better way of doing all this I am open to suggestions.
This explains why there are no transactions at all for any customer. The church does not invoice the members. The members give an unspecified amount by cash or check. Perhaps there is a better way to approach the problem? Instead of treating each donator as a customer receipt I could treat each donation as a journal entry, or perhaps treat the donators as suppliers instead of customers?
No, you cannot. You cannot enter transactions involving the movement of funds as journal entries in Manager.
Also not right.
You should just enter the receipts, posting them to a designated income account. You should be able to create your desired report as a custom report by listing the dates, contacts, and credits to that income account and grouping by contact. You don’t need to create the donors as customers or suppliers. Leave them on the receipts as Other. You need to make sure, however, that you are consistent with the names.
I had just determined that supplier does not work for the same reason as customer. I had already created a designated income account titled Offerings, and that is where the receipts were directed. I entered a few new receipts as other, but I do not see how this helps since I lose all track of where the money came from. I did see anywhere in the receipt entry process to enter the receipt as coming from a specific contact, or how to create a contact.
No, you don’t. You fill the offeror’s name in next to the Other dropdown field. The content of this field becomes the Contact variable for your custom report. The reason you think you lost track is that the built-in Customer Statement does not include the receipts. That’s why you need the custom report.
You don’t create contacts, you just enter them on the receipt:
Transactions on customer statement don’t include receipts posted to income accounts but that will eventually happen as per the topic in ideas. This will be useful if donor requires a statement.
So if the following screenshot is what you are after:
Then you need to create each Church Member as a Customer and enter a receipt for each donation as per below screenshot. For bank donations I would use receipt rules on statement imports to expedite this, for cash donations just simply enter them by hand:
Thanks so much. This forum is wonderful. Using custom report and making each member a customer will work very well. Entering the offerings each week is easy because I can clone each donation after the first one just by changing the customer and amount. It looks the custom report can be cloned for each member, or I can just divide it up in MS Word or whatever. This little difficulty has been beneficial since I needed to learn how to use custom reports anyway. Manager should be simple to use for our church treasurer once I get it set up.
@Mark’s suggestion is a good one, although you might instead delete the Donations selection. The debits (which you’ve given the alias of Donations) and credits are the balancing portions of the double entry. The debit is what was posted to the bank or cash account. The credit is what was posted to the income account.
But I am confused by Jimmy Jazz’s entries. Neither the Donation nor the Credit column sums correctly. Can you post screen shots of the Edit screens for the 11/21/2021 and 11/28/2021 offerings?
Yes. The image was the last page of a two page report. All of the donors are imaginary. I need to make the reports look better, and I think I can do this now. Removing one of the columns will help. Each member (donor) needs to get an individual confidential report at the end of each year for tax purposes. Manager looks like it will also work very well for issuing reports for expenditures vs. budget, and a bunch of other issues. I found a thread related to church accounting on this forum. I will post to that thread once I have become more familiar with manager.
