Baker Tilly helps church organization improve efficiency

Client background

A religious institution that has been deeply rooted in the Orlando community and works within a larger network of churches to ensure accountability, share resources and support the ministry of the global church.

The business challenge

The client's financial recording of church deposits were limited to relying on manual processes, with the imports and exports from their church management system to Sage Intacct taking two to three hours per week. There was a certain level of human intervention and data manipulation to create the imports that was error-prone and inefficient. Bank reconciliations, including reconciling credit cards and Automatic Clearing House (ACH) transactions, were very labor-intensive, forcing employees to spend 10-12 hours per month on managing four bank accounts. Realizing how much time was spent each month with antiquated, manual processes, the client decided they needed a more efficient process for their accounting of church deposits.

Strategy and solution

As the client uses Sage Intacct for their accounting system, Baker Tilly was able to efficiently implement our Church Management Systems Integration into their pre-existing system, making a significant difference in their time and efforts exerted each month. Initially focusing on contribution transactions, Baker Tilly encouraged them to process and map non-contribution transactions as well. By doing this, we were able to have a “double-win” to cover both areas that each had very manual, time-consuming steps.

With our Church Management Systems Integration, the client was able to achieve the following:

• 10 to 12 hours per month saved working on reconciling four bank accounts by automating the process to match bank and general ledger records
• A move from manual import/export processes to an application programming interface (API) integration, saving them two to three hours per week and delivering a higher level of accuracy and less data manipulation when creating the imports

With the help from Baker Tilly, the client now has a church management system that not only transfers data efficiently, but also cuts down on countless hours of unnecessary manual efforts.