Accounting Budgets

ChurchTrac features a complete church budget software that's built into the Accounting screen. The Budget Screen allows you to create annual church budgets and evaluate the amounts spent or received against your budget.

• Before You Create Budgets
• Creating A New Budget
• Church Budget Setup
• Evaluating Your Budget vs Actual
• Budget Reports
• Pro Tips

Before You Create Budgets

Before you create a budget for your church, you will need to first set up your Categories by selecting the Categories tab at the top of the Accounting Screen. This is part of your initial Accounting Setup that needs to be completed prior.

Creating A New Budget

Once your categories are set up, return to the Budget Screen and select "Actions," then select the "Create Budget" option.

In the following screen, give your budget a name and start date. Then select the categories and subcategories you want to include in this budget.

Once you have verified that all the appropriate categories are highlighted, select the "Create Budget" button. The following screen will look like this:

Church Budget Setup

You will notice the new budget initially has $0 budgeted for each category. There are two ways you can set up each item of your new budget.

Detailed Setup

To do a detailed setup for each budget item, select that line of the budget and enter the budget amount and item period in the following window.

You can choose a yearly or monthly item period, or create a custom period for each line item.

Quick Setup

To do a quick setup that allows you to quickly enter the amount of each budget item without having to edit each line, select the "Actions" button, then select "Edit this Budget."

In this window, you can enter the budget amount, add or remove line items, and change the budget name or start date.

Evaluating Budget vs. Actual

You can evaluate the budget vs. actual amounts by selecting a date from the drop-down list. The time period will begin at the established start date of the budget and end at the date indicated by your selection.

The Income and Expense Category items will reflect the year-to-date budget for the time period selected. Each time you adjust the time period, these amounts will change to reflect the new time period. These reports are cumulative.

Budget Reports

ChurchTrac offers a variety of budget reports. To find them, select the "Actions" button, then choose "Budget Reports."

Select the report you need, then select "View Report" for a PDF version, or "Export to CSV" for an editable spreadsheet.

Budget Report Options

• Auto: Shows what is being displayed on the Budget screen
• Show All: Shows totals for the parent and subcategories
• Hide All: Shows total of parent category

Pro Tips

The order the Categories appear on the Budget, as well as the income or expense designation can be edited in the Categories tab on the Accounting screen toolbar.

You can clone any budget in ChurchTrac in seconds. Select the budget you wish to clone. Then select the “actions” button and choose clone budget. This means that creating budgets in the future will be even faster. Yay!

For budget items that only happen for a specific time period in your yearly budget, navigate to the budget item, select "Period" and set the date range.

The data in the reports will reflect the time period set on the "Display Budget Through" drop-down selection box at the top of the screen.

Since a Parent Category includes amounts from ALL of its subcategories, there are situations in which you will want to move non-budgeted subcategories to their own Parent Category that will not be included in your budget.

Examples of this include employee-shared withholdings such as:

• Social Security & Medicare Taxes
• Federal withholdings
• State & local tax withholdings
• Employee retirement contributions