Whether you are a small, a growing or a multinational assembly; one important factor you must not ignore, and which you must pay apt attention to as a general overseer or church finance officer, is the overall financial and cash flow position of your church. A number of times, I hear church admins tell me that they really do not need strict accounting policies or documentations as everybody is spiritual; hence they are expected to exhibit a great level of financial discipline and honesty towards the church finance. That’s quite interesting! But for me, I believe as much as there was a Judas among the twelve disciples, there stands to be more of such persons in the church considering the number of crimes church people commit since they are less likely to be caught.
Back to the aim of this guide – deploying accounting software for churches; I’d like to share key reasons why tracking cash flows in churches is very important:
- You plan the church budget on a weekly, monthly or annual basis based on cash flow trend and how can you plan when you don’t know how much you are expecting or cash on hand?
- You incur expenses and would like to channel fund to vital projects that will drive church growth, with accounting software, allocating resources based on data presented seems easy. You also see the possibility of expanding the church’s presence to areas that are not currently covered.
- Church also pay workers, hence, they need to track salaries and allowances.
- Plus more
How QuickBooks Can Help Churches Track Cash flow
Members
Every church accounting must start from membership record; you need to have details of your members so that income categories like ‘Tithe, or Special Donations” can easily be traced to a particular member.
Revenue
The key sources of revenue for churches are ‘offerings’, ‘tithes‘, and ‘special donations – seed offering, thanksgiving etc.’. In QuickBooks, you can create each of these revenue categories as an “item under service” and map it to an income account.
Expenses
It’s not only profit-organizations that incurs expenses, churches also do. Besides, the church is one of the top spenders as they embark on several community developments, life transforming projects, building projects, etc., within or across the border. At least, if I do not know how other churches spend, I can confidently say that the church where I worship spends heavily on local and international projects including outreach events worldwide.
With QuickBooks, you will not only track daily, weekly or monthly expenses, but will also have a feature that makes it flexible for you to map them to a specific project or event for accountability purpose.
While these areas are updated on the front end, executives can explore the reporting side to view the overall report of statement of asset and liabilities, revenue and expenditure, membership collections, tithe, etc.
For more details on how we can deploy and improve your church accounting system using QuickBooks, call our instant report centre: 08084219399, 08105090001 or email us at info@accountingsoftware.com.ng