How to track church offerings

In a database I am working on for my church I want to be able to track the donations made by our members and to print receipts. Basically my needs are as follows:

1. Maintain the over-all giving history of each member.
2. Maintain a year-to-date giving history for each member.
3. Print receipts for all donors and donations since last posting.
Usually done on a monthly basis but can vary.

Having never done much in the financial area, I'm not sure how to get started. Can someone point me in the right direction or help me get started with some sample code? I am using Access as my database and DAO 3.6.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks,
Rev. Michael L. Burns

u have u'r tables all ready to go?

Peet,

Not all of them. Not sure yet how amny more I need. Am kinda looking ahead and trying to foresee what I might need.

Pastor Mike

from what I can see I would say u only need two tables.

one containing the members, and one containing the donation information.

the rest will be pulling out data using SQL.

u think the same?

Peet.

That's what I am thinking. The Members table would have name and address information while the donations table would have fields for date, amount of doantion and several fields for designation of the gift in case the donation is to be split among several designated areas, ie, Home Missions, Sabbath School, Local Church Needs, Food Pantry, etc.

As I mentioned earlier I want to be able to track the donations so that I can keep an ongoing history of each member's giving (to maintained as long as they are members), to be able to print receipts (probrably with Crystal Reports or Word) at varying intervals (once a month, every three months, six months or once a year). Basically, if I print reports on April 30 I need to retain the history of giving but I also need to set the giving to 0 as I start a new quarter or what have you. I also need to maintain year -to-date totals.

Basically, I want to be able to enter the donor information from week-to-week and then at the end of the month or quarter, be able to click a button and run the queries required to print the reports, etc and preparing me for the next period without losing history or year to date.

Pastor Mike

hmm think u should do 3 tables then.

the designated areas should be a sep. table, instead of fields in the donation table. (makes life easyer when u want to expand the designated areas)

So u have

Member
Donaitons
Designated_areas

Each Member has his/hers uniq ID (Autoincr. field)
Donations have filed to correspond to UserID, and a field to correspond to the Designated_areas table.


does that make sense ?

Michael, I edited that last post... (seeing u'r online, I'd just wanted to make sure u saw that :) )

Peet,

Yes. That does make sense. I can forsee having to add more designations for the donors prefrence for his/her donation.

Pastor Mike

How is the project going along Michael?

Have u gotten any further ?

And maybe you will need another field or two for tracking the printing process. For e.g. if you want to print receipts for all donations given by a member since the last printed receipt, you could add a field to your donation table that said "Printed" which would be a Yes/No field. And when printing receipts, all the receipts which have been included in the printing can be marked with Yes, while new receipts can be marked with No.

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