Three Common Annoyances Faced by Church Financial Teams

Do you manage finances at a church? If so, you know that there are some unique challenges. From managing people to managing funds, it’s likely you are doing more than just financial work, and when the financial work starts taking more and more time each month, it’s taking away from the other work you need to do, as well as the ministry work you want to do. Today, we would like to share with you three common challenges that affect churches, and a couple options to overcome them.

Monthly and/or Weekly Reporting

Churches and other faith-based organizations are held to a high standard by their parishioners, who like to see that their tithing and other contributions are being used to do good for the community and for the church itself. Church leaders like to see steady or rising attendance numbers, and stakeholders like seeing a stable financial future for the church.

For financial and church operations professionals, the best way to communicate this is through a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual report to share the financial health of the church and each of its funds, as well as attendance numbers, projections, P&L statements and more.

Unfortunately, for churches without the processes or technology in place to get the job done, generating these reports requires a lot of manual effort—copying and pasting data between multiple documents and spreadsheets, transposing information from paper into a computer, manually analyzing the numbers, and hoping there are no errors in any of the processes or documents.

Put simply, the process of generating a report takes more and more time each month, and the growing amount of data means that each month takes just slightly longer than last.

Getting Information to Decision Makers

If the information is delayed—or worse, incorrect—decision makers are unable to lead your church’s long-term strategy. When it comes to fund accounting, delays in reports could hold back your ability to expand, improve, or work on outreach—all of which could lead to lower turnout or fewer contributions from parishioners who feel their money is not being used properly.

By improving processes and technology, you can gain access not only to faster reports, but smarter and more robust reports based on more metrics.

Buying Paper

How much do you spend on paper each month? With outdated accounting technology, you could be wasting much-needed on paper, when there are modern options that help you to break your paper habit.

With newer technology, you can get rid of the paper-based processes that waste time and money to complete, allowing you to focus even more energy on ministry. By automating your church’s financial processes, you can free yourself of the paper costs and the time and effort it takes to print, scan, convert, and enter data.

The cloud has been a game changer in the nonprofit space, and now, even more churches are getting on board. By moving to the cloud, churches are able to get world-class technology without the world class costs that come with it. Better security, fewer upfront costs, guarantees you can count on, and more.

Conclusion: Have the Time and Money to Do More

When you can focus your time and effort on ministry, it means that you getting back to the basics and focusing on what really matters: Doing God’s Work. If you want to grow your church without growing your accounting staff we would like to hear from you. Intacct Cloud Financial Management is easily customizable to your church’s needs, Intacct can help you save money, automate processes, strengthen internal controls, and easily report to multiple stakeholders. Intacct helps your dollars go farther, so you can do more with less and be the best steward possible.

Intacct Success Stories

Churches of all sizes and denominations have made the move to embrace cloud accounting with Intacct. From local to multi-location megachurch, Intacct has been there, providing the automation that financial leaders need to get back to focusing on the mission. A fair share of Intacct’s 11,000+ customers are churches, and among the success stories:

• Church of the King
• Faith Promise Church
• Grace Fellowship Church

rinehimerbaker is ready to help your church leverage the cloud to improve financial processes and free up time to get back to mission and ministry. Get in contact with us to learn more.