Is your church getting the most out of its accounting technology?

As churches and faith-based organizations grow, managing financial processes, like expense reconciliations and allocations, becomes too complex to be handled through spreadsheets. Leaders need clear, accurate and current information. Getting visibility across multiple campuses and ministries, as well as tracking different sources of revenue as organizations diversify, can no longer be a manual process.

Most churches start out using systems like QuickBooks and Xero to record their basic accounting processes. These systems are affordable, well known and easy to use for entry level accounting functionality. But as a church grows, it may find these systems are not adaptable and customizable enough for their expanding business and ministry needs.

Growing churches have complex demands such as automating core processes, supporting distributed work teams, consolidating multiple entities, enforcing internal controls or delivering insight with faster report times, which some of these systems are not designed to do, especially for faith-based organizations.

It’s quite common to be bogged down with manual data entry, unruly spreadsheets, time-consuming workarounds and patched-together analyses as your organization grows and becomes more complex. Some common symptoms of outgrowing the capabilities of your current accounting system are:

• Insufficient information in reports to make decisions with confidence: Churches often struggle to generate the reports they need to make better business decisions in real time
• Manual processes and spreadsheets become unwieldy and prone to error: Organizations are forced to do cumbersome workarounds to manage multiple locations and perform operational analysis
• Lengthy close of financial periods: Some systems do not offer dashboards or built-in capabilities for complex processes. Manual processes and spreadsheets are time-consuming to consolidate, prone to errors and offer limited visibility.

It’s time for automation

Many faith-based organizations gradually develop sophisticated accounting requirements such as revenue recognition and multi-entity consolidation. Once your church starts to outgrow your accounting software, it leaves users over-reliant on spreadsheets and manual entry. This often means your team is forced to build cumbersome workarounds to complete complex processes.