Multi-entity church benefits from migration to the cloud

Client background

Established in 1954, Bethel Church of Redding is a nondenominational charismatic megachurch with three physical campuses, as well as an online campus, based in Redding, California. The church has a congregation of roughly 11,000. The finance team at Bethel Church manages six different entities, including the church, a music label and publishing company, a media provider, a conservatory and a technical school - all of which are run on Baker Tilly's church accounting software. The organization has been on the Baker Tilly church financial platform for more than a year, having migrated from Shelby v.5, an accounting system the church used for roughly 20 years.

The business challenge

The church finance team found budgeting to be cumbersome and began to feel that the system was antiquated. Mac users had to log into a separate server to use the accounting system. "It made for a really clunky process," says John Raftery, CFO at Bethel Church. "In order to perform one task, it could take up to three steps." 

As the church expanded its operations, the structure changed - what were once different departments became separate legal entities. Managing those entities with their existing system was a very manual process. Financials for each entity had to be run separately and then consolidated in Excel, with no ability to drill down to the transaction level. Because of these challenges and the lack of anywhere, anytime web access, the church began to look for something more accessible and browser-based.

Capabilities needed in a new system identified by the finance team included automated multi-entity consolidations and a cloud- or web-based user interface. They had also grown frustrated with the processes around maintenance releases and the amount of time it would take for the system to be fully operable after a release. The church wanted to move to a more modern, innovative solution.

Strategy and solution

With Shelby's announced end to maintenance for their v.5 product in March of 2020, the obvious path for Bethel Church seemed to be ShelbyNEXT, a web-based version of the Shelby product. The team's mindset was more that they needed to upgrade, rather than needing to do a software evaluation and consider moving to a new platform. Another church recommended they look at Baker Tilly and that changed their perspective. "It was a real 'wow' moment when we saw Sage Intacct," says Raftery. "Baker Tilly expanded our thinking. They gave us insight into our potential and once we realized what was available, it didn't take long to realize Baker Tilly would add so many capabilities for us."

Bethel Church is a large organization with many moving parts. That made implementing an entirely new accounting system a challenge. Teaming up with Baker Tilly's implementation team helped make that processes smoother.  Baker Tilly has a team of former church finance leaders who have implemented Sage Intacct for more than 200 churches. 

With Baker Tilly, Bethel Church has taken advantage of a number of innovations unavailable to them with their former system. Raftery highlighted a few:

• The ability to reclassify or change the posting information for transactions within an open period without making a journal entry
• The ability to duplicate journal entries
• The ability to upload journal entries into Sage Intacct via templates
• The ability to scan from any printer
• The ability to drag and drop PDF files and attachments
• The ability to integrate seamlessly with other business systems, like Asset Edge fixed assets, FloQast close automation software, Martus budgeting and Nexonia's time and expense management for credit card purchases

Raftery and his team emphasized Sage Intacct's reporting many times during our conversation. Bethel Church manages a large number of events and the finance team generates reports on those events on a weekly or bi-monthly basis. The ability to "memorize" or clone those reports and schedule them to go out has been a life changer. "That feature alone has saved my team untold hours," says Raftery.

Drill-down capability - running a General Ledger report and drilling down to AP to see where the transaction came from and look at the back-up documentation - is another feature Raftery and his team emphasized. "Previously, we had to go to a separate module and navigate a confusing back-up system. This has saved us hours of work and probably our sanity."