Name: Solving Common Church Accounting Challenges
Uploaded: 2026-01-15T20:30:42.300Z
Duration: 1 h 44 s
Description: Solving Common Church Accounting Challenges

Transcript for "Solving Common Church Accounting Challenges": driving the deck, so I do need speaker mode. Right? Mhmm. Yeah. Okay. Hey, everybody. We are so glad you are joining us. There are a few of you that even signed on early. So glad you're here. I we this is we've got record registration for this webinar. This tells me that we are hungry to solve common church accounting challenges. So if you would, please, if you haven't already, go ahead and say hi to us in the chat, and let us know where you're tuning in from and your role, please. So hello, however you prefer. You can do a GIF. You can do an emoji, and then let us know where you're tuning in from and your role, and we'll get started here in just a second. We'll give folks another couple minutes to to join us. Love it. Man, y'all understood the assignment. Awesome. Wow. This is moving so fast. I can hardly read all of these. What about this? Let's do this to make things easier. I've got Jonathan on with me, and and he's our our accounting nerd, if you will, on the call today. I'm learning. He's like a cool nerd, though, but he's the one that knows this stuff way more than I do. So I'm learning along with you guys. But let's do this just for quick visual reference. If you are in the accounting role at your church, whatever that looks like, whether you're a volunteer, licensed, whatever that is, let's have you drop an emoji. Let's do the money emoji if there is one. Whatever's actually, just whatever whatever emoji, you wanna drop in and let us know. That would be super helpful. That'll give us a quick, yes, this is so much easier. Wow. Yes. This is awesome. Alright. Accounting people in the house. I am so grateful. Richard, that's a great emoji. I use that one all the time. Katrina, yes. This is also would be a great icebreaker. How many roles do you do at your church? How many hats do you wear at your church? Okay. Well, thank you so much for your engagement already. I feel like this is gonna be such a great webinar. Obviously, we have found the chat. So if you would take a quick look, just to the right of where it says chat on the right hand side of your screen, you should see another tab there that says q and a. That is where we would like for you to drop your questions. We will answer as many of your questions as possible. And when I say we, I actually mean our friend Joe. He is behind the scenes. He is going to be addressing your questions as they come in. We will we will likely not answer a ton of tax questions because you really should be consulting your tax professional for those types of questions. So these are really let's talk more about, like, what's what Joe's behind the scenes. Let's talk about more what, you know, is relevant to what we're discussing today. Those questions will be addressed by Joe. And then if it's something that we feel like will be super duper beneficial to everybody else on the call, we may or may not address that question publicly as well. But, yeah, let's keep those q and a's in the q and a tab just to help Joe out. That's gonna be the most efficient way for him to address your questions in a timely manner. So, again, thanks for being here. We are looking good. Numbers are slowing down, so we will go ahead and get started. So we are gonna do a quick introduction. My name is Jess Moore. I've been doing webinars here for a little while. I know I think it was Katrina that said it was your first webinar, so welcome. We're so happy to have you. And if this is your first webinar, welcome. Hopefully, this one is enjoyable for you. We've worked really hard to bring you content that we hope is valuable. And so I'm in marketing, and so this is my partnership with Jonathan is because he knows about accounting, and I'm gonna let him introduce himself. Hey, everybody. Jonathan Howell. I'm a senior enterprise account executive on the that's a a really fancy title. Sounds impressive. That's that's a really nice way to say sales guy. Do not hiss at me as before I was the sales guy. I spent over a decade implementing nonprofit accounting software for churches and for a lot of different kinds of nonprofits. So I've actually got more experience on the implementation side than I have on the sales side. So everybody everybody calm down and put down the pitchforks. We'll be we'll be good to go. I'm down in if you hear a little accent, I'm down in Charleston, South Carolina. I go to a not just attend, Southern Baptist Church, here, but I'm actually an elder there. We have a school, a k 12 school where my kids attend attached to the church. I'm the treasurer, for the booster club there. So actually applying what we're talking about, in the in the real world. And this past Friday, I was in a free throw competition during a a a basketball game against the Chick fil A cow, and I was dressed in our school's mascot costume That is in no way relevant to this session but I won the free throw contest. So I like to bring that up. Yeah. Just a little bit of bragging real quick before we start. I love it. I am so excited to be doing this with Jonathan because you can tell already that he is hilarious. So, hopefully, we will keep this content. And and a nerd, apparently. Thanks for that. He's a hilarious accounting nerd. Okay. This is gonna be great, y'all. Okay. Let's go ahead and get started. Why are we here? We are talking about church accounting because it is different than for profit accounting. And so we want to highlight some of the most common issues. We're not gonna attack all of them today. We just don't have time for that, but we're gonna address three of the most common issues or challenges, if you will, and hopefully present some solutions for you. So, any anything to add here, Jonathan, before we move on? As as far as I'm concerned, we can we can rock and roll. Okay. Awesome. So I'm gonna let you take this slide, though. You bet. And let me let me apologize to anyone of of any denomination that looks down on rock and roll. I shouldn't have said we we we can praise music from here if we would if we would rather. So when it comes to church accounting, they we know that for profit accounting is different from nonprofit accounting due to the the need for fund restrictions, the need for potentially different audiences for our reports, different decision making groups that come into play. As we look specifically at or even more specifically down from not for profit but nonprofit, we look even more specifically at church accounting. We can also run into you I really wanted to call out the volunteer supported finance teams. Nonprofit accounting for the Red Cross or for Young Life or something like that, they are faced with with the problem of needing to hire their seventh AP entry clerk. Right? Here in the church space, we may be faced with a problem of hoping we can get our seventh giving unit to start tithing. Right? So the the the challenges of scale are so much broader for our church audience and for our church clients and potential clients even versus just the common challenges that all nonprofits face versus for profits. K? And we're gonna we'll we'll dive deeper into a number of these aspects as we go. As as Jeff said, I really wanna focus on three main topics today with several subtopics under those. Awesome. Okay, so really quick, I'm going to address the most common question that we have already coming into the Q and A. I should have said this at the very beginning. This webinar is being recorded, and you will receive a recording tomorrow. Twenty four hours after the webinar, so whatever time you tuned in in your time zone, that's when you should receive the recording, so you'll be able to share that along and review. Don't feel like you need to furiously take notes or screenshots of our slides. You'll be able to to view that recording at your leisure. So thank you, everyone, for asking that. That actually means a lot to us. We're we're glad that you think this is already valuable. Okay. So next, we're gonna do a quick poll. We have presented to you, you know, what what we have seen are common challenges, but we're gonna launch this poll and would love if you would I'm gonna open that up. Next to the chat, now you should see a poll tab. You should also have a little notification at the bottom of your screen. But go ahead and engage with that poll for us if you would, and let us know what's the biggest challenge that you face in church accounting in your specific role, your specific church denomination, whatever that might be. I'm not seeing any votes coming in yet. Do you guys see that? Are you seeing okay. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Okay. So if you're looking for it, again, it's between the chat and the q and a, and you can check as many of those as apply to you. So oh, yes. The votes are rolling in. Jonathan, if you wanna see the votes, you can click on polls, and it'll let you see on that left for you, the left hand side, and you'll be able to kinda see what what what I'm seeing. But a lot of people are struggling with keeping financial records organized and accurate. That seems to be the top vote right now. Oh, no. Getting clear timely financial reports for leadership. Oh gosh. We're all over the place, guys. This is great. Thank you. This is amazing feedback for us as well. Right? Okay. We'll leave that open for just a minute longer. Thank you so much for your engagement. Yeah. Still, keeping financial records organized and accurate is the number one for sure. Well, friends, we can help with that. Alright. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up this poll in 03/21. Closing that out. Alright. So we can go ahead and move on. Jonathan, it's you from here on out. I am listening and learning along with everyone, and and, hopefully, I'll be able to to chime in with some of these questions as they roll in. But, yeah, this is that that whole information is so helpful to us, you guys. I really, really appreciate your engagement there. Sweet. Alright. And I should be able to advance the slides myself. Yep. There we go. Making sure. Alright. A lot of what everyone has called out, the the reporting issues. I saw Jacqueline not having enough time is the biggest issue. Everybody's wearing multiple hats. A lot of this comes down to the first call it a bucket of mistakes that we see, which is weak foundations on the accounting system itself. For example, trying to use a for profit system instead of a nonprofit system that's designed for fund accounting and separating restricted dollars from unrestricted dollars. A chart of accounts that was put in place twenty years ago and has been held together with with bailing wire and duct tape since then as things are added and things are removed or things should be removed but can't be removed and things need to be added but to get and we can talk for the next half hour about chart of accounts problems. The the the point there, the overarching theme there is lack of strategy or lack of ability to expand and shape the chart of accounts as you go. These two last two on the left there, overloaded and misused account codes and inability to distinguish between source and purpose. These two a lot of times roll together. If we're trying to lean on one segment of the account string to answer more than one question. Let me give you an example. And as you're you're sitting here thinking, man, Jonathan's got a lot of bullets for how we're all doing wrong. Jonathan's sitting up there all high and mighty calling out our errors. You remember a few minutes ago, said I'm an elder at a Southern Baptist church and we have a school and I'm on the treasurer for that, but I didn't tell you what church it is. And there's reason for that. It so happens that I am dealing with some of these same issues right now today. For example, as the treasurer for the booster club, I'm responsible for keeping, I'll say, the books and do air quotes. I'll come back to what those books are a couple of slides from now. But last month or a couple of months ago, we held our basketball tip-off event. And as part of this, we had a silent auction. We had ticket sales. We had the concession stand open. We had a number of different things. Well, there's no way the way in in how our accounting system is structured currently. I can have revenue say it's either concessions revenue. We have a concessions manager who's responsible for that. Or I can say that the revenue is associated with the basketball tip-off event. I cannot do both. I cannot enter, call it a $100 worth of revenue and know that this $100 is concession sales at the basketball tip-off event. I can have one aspect or the other. That's not good. And that's what I mean by the inability to distinguish between source and purpose, trying to cram too much information into the account code segment without having additional segments or transaction characteristics that can further define the entries that we're making. I say all that to say, have real world examples not of how I'm awesome, but of how I am struggling with a lot of the things that I've seen, again, for the past couple of decades here in this space. K? And then finally, over there on the the the last one on the right hand side, we've always done it this way. I know that everyone who works in a church has heard the phrase, we've always done it this way. I'm a Southern Baptist so I can tell this one. How many Southern Baptist does it take to change a light bulb? Change is the is is the Southern Baptist light bulb joke for for that one. The the the close cousin to we've always done it this way is the assumption that it has to be done this way. K? What I see a lot excuse me. What I see a lot is the assumption that, yeah, our accounting system does not really work well for us, but all accounting systems are the same. To a certain extent, there's some truth in that. Pretty much any decent accounting system, you're gonna have debits on the left and credits on the right, and they're gonna have to balance. Or one accounting system, just like any other, the balance sheet's gonna have assets and liabilities and assets. Hooray. But when you get down into the details, there are a lot of differences between different accounting systems and different ways to use accounting systems that will allow you to set yourself up for success and will, if used properly, allow you to solve some of the issues that you're facing. We've always done it this way. Maybe that does not mean it must always be this way. I'm. gonna take one quick pause for some water jest. We need to address any questions. No. Well, not no. Not at this time. But I will say that I I think change in general is difficult if you are I mean, really, organization, but I've seen this consistently in churches because it's generally not a one person decision. You need to bring this to the board. Mhmm. You know, it's a collective decision. And then you've got people who are volunteers a lot of times implementing this new software. There's a, you know, Mhmm. a delay in training. So we understand. We we get we get that this is this is sometimes hard to implement and and and accept the change for more than just the fact that we don't like change. Right? There are actual obstacles sometimes to making the change. And so I think I think the big idea is just, you know, as you're as we're going through this discussion, be open minded. Think it looks to me based on the chat that a lot of y'all are actually here because you want improvement, which is incredible. So we are here to support that. And and and if you are specifically looking to explore our software, I'm just gonna go ahead and call this out here at the beginning of the webinar because I'm seeing the the chat. And so if you are, please know that we will have a QR code a little bit later in the presentation where you can scan that and set up a quick call with someone on our team. We have dedicated executive or account executives that will help you based on your church side size and your church needs. And so please know that that won't be just like a spray and pray situation. It will be very strategic in how we connect with you afterwards. But just this the the point of this webinar is for you guys to hear directly from Jonathan who is operating in this in his personal life and then also connecting with churches every single day to help meet this need. And so he he's here because he holds a lot of experience and knowledge. And so, yeah, we I I see you. I hear you in the chat saying, am over 70. I just need something simple. I just need something helpful. So we are here for you. So, yeah, I just wanted to call that out. We've got a lot of folks, in the same boat, Jonathan. So that's exciting. Also wanted to make you aware of that. So no questions yet, but we we will have the opportunity for you guys to connect with someone here in just a little bit. So that said, we can move on. Okay. Perfect. So having those weak foundations in place leads to we just so happen to have bullets that a number of you have touched on already. Having to use multiple systems to try to get the accounting work done and reports that don't make sense, reports that people can't actually leverage. The the the time that it takes either to clean up data or even just to move data or rekey or re rekey data from one system into another. And all of this leading to when you're presented with a report, finally, after all of this work, you get something in your hands that shows numbers. Are you able to trust those numbers or do you have to look sideways at it and say, mhmm. Knowing everything that's gone into generating this, it's a coin flip whether or not the data I'm looking at is is actually accurate and actionable data. K? So is there anything that we can do about this? And I I don't mean we specifically. I mean, I do mean we specifically. But even if you don't want the sales guy to pitch you, which I get, looking broader and more generally, is there anything that can be done about this? The answer is absolutely yes. A lot of it. A lot of it goes back to the way that the chart of accounts and any transaction characteristics that aren't part of the account string goes back to how that's designed. When I was again, I spent years implementing accounting systems. The best part, the most exciting part, the most fun part okay, Jess. That does sound nerdy when I say it, but bear with me. The most fun part of an accounting system implementation is designing the new chart of accounts from scratch and figuring out, okay, what are all the elements of our church that needs to be reflected in our books and how does it need to be reported on? And where's our church gonna be five years from now, ten years from now? Are we building in enough aspects to grow and expand so that this system will continue to meet our needs ten years, fifteen years from now, or can scale to continue to meet those needs? And. because once that part is set, once you get the design right and you've got the ability to scale baked in, then your accounting life stays much, much easier even. as you go and as your business changes. Yeah. The the one thing I wanna to point out, the the the guardrails to prevent errors. Now to a certain extent, preventing errors, there's only so much we can do to prevent. If somebody journals a a debit or credit to the wrong account, well, that that's but that's we'll we'll catch that later and we'll do an adjusting entry. We'll fix it. That's fine. But things like I'm I'm I'm gonna be I'm gonna be careful here. Some problems are errors, accidents, oopsies. They happen. They get fixed. Other problems can be caused by intentional bad actors. Nobody on this call, no church on this call would ever have any staff member who would intentionally I I won't say the word but it it rhymes with the embezzlement. Nobody on this call would ever have such a thing. But theoretically, you can understand that if your accounting system does not have granular controls and if you as an accounting office have not put separation of duties in place to keep different aspects of accounting segmented from each other so that just off the top of my head, one person does not enter invoices and approve invoices and cut checks to pay those invoices and have the ability, the ability to void and purge checks from the system. Having one person in the system that can do all of the above doesn't lead to errors, it leads to money missing from your accounts. Again, this is theoretical for everyone on the call, but think about other churches that didn't join us today. So it it's not just a matter of having the chart of accounts structured the way it needs to be. It's a matter of having policies and procedures in place, understanding understanding that not every church has extra staff members just falling out of their pockets. But to the greatest extent possible, having policies and procedures in place to keep intentional bad actors from being able to. do something you don't want them to do. I love this. Yes. This is like me. My kid is 14. He just turned 14 in October, and he cannot wait to start driving whenever he gets his permit when he's 15. But he's already thinking about this. And I and I'm already prepared to be using this, like, classic parent phrase. It's not your it's not you that I'm concerned about. Right? It's everybody else around you on the road that I'm concerned about. I'm sure your. driving will be great. I'm sure your books are being managed beautifully. It's everybody else that could potentially be a problem. So, yes, it's always best practice to have some built in guardrails, processes, and procedures. So, love that. Somebody in the the I'm I'm not focusing on the chat because I'll get locked in to doing that. and and interacting. that way instead. But I I I do notice someone says, yeah. Problems are one thing. What about solutions? I am so glad that you asked. Now Jess did make me the sales guy promise that I would not get pitchy on you. So. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this slide other than to say that it so happens that here at Ministry of Brands, we have an accounting solution that addresses all of the above and more in that it it's a purpose built nonprofit accounting system with a strong consulting team to ensure that the chart of accounts is set up as it needs to be and to fulfill all of the not just fulfill all of the requirements that you have today when you set it up, but it offers the scalability. The screenshot that we grabbed is expand the chart of accounts and to expand segments, to add additional segments. We have the ability to scale as you grow and to change as your needs change without ruining the audit trail, without ruining all the work that you've already done. I I should specify as well that the my my own church only just now became my account. They don't use us yet, and hence why they're having the problems. I'm gonna talk about a couple more coming up in just a minute. But give me give me a few weeks to get them moved on to our system before you blame me, please. Alright. Thanks. Just wanna call out Jim's sweet comment here. He said I'm a walking billboard for financial module for ministry brands accounting. We may also have some clients joining us from our our Shelby product. We are really, really glad that anyone that already leverages our financial and accounting software is here today. Love to see it. Appreciate y'all being here. So thanks for the shout out, Jim. That's super kind. Awesome. Alright, Jess. We ready to ready to keep going? Yeah. Let's do it. Mistake number two. Okay. I'm I'm I'm even gonna prep everybody for what's coming up next. Everybody everybody grip grip hold of your chairs. This one this one's gonna hit. The second mistake that we see, reliance on spreadsheets and manual workflows. And as the the pastor at the church where I grew up says, oh, you've gone to Medlin now. Huge mistake. Huge mistake and I see it constantly is a reliance on our good old friend Excel. Now, to be clear, I love Excel. I use Excel pretty much every day in my job. Excel is I'm a be honest. Excel is a wonderful data manipulation tool. What's the keyword in that sentence? The keyword in that sentence is not wonderful. The keyword in that sentence is manipulation. If we are relying on Excel to generate our financial statements and financial reports and present information to others, we cannot trust what we are doing. Again, no one on this call would ever intentionally do something wrong or would ever intentionally make a mistake. What I'm saying is mistakes happen in Excel. And those mistakes, when they happen in Excel, do not have the audit trail that. a properly designed accounting system has. Here comes the big example. I, as the treasurer of our booster club and, am responsible for generating the reports every month that I present to the rest of the the booster club board and the the booster club as a whole. I do not have access. We the Booster Club is subsidiary to the school. The school is subsidiary subsidiary to the church. So I am way downstream of the actual accounting entries that are made. Every month, I get a report from the church out of the accounting system that they use. It's not ours yet. I get that report. I then have to key the data into Excel so that the data can be grouped and totaled and summarized in a way that the Booster Club board wants to see it. And then I present those Excel numbers to the board. Now if anyone comes up to me and I'm I'm I I try to do my job as if I'm getting paid. I try to do my job correctly. But if anyone comes up to me and says, Jonathan, the this that you've presented to the to the board, prove that these numbers are accurate. I cannot do it. There's no way for me to do it other than to say, you you just have to trust me. I mean, I can I can forward them the report out of the books? I can show them my Excel spreadsheet. I can I can let them look? But the only way that they can trust what I'm presenting them is if they trust that I've done my data keying correctly. Mhmm. Yep. That's not good. That that's that's something that we need to get away from. But again, I I I see that so often and it it doesn't even go back necessarily to well, we've always done it this way. So often, it goes back to, well, the way that our books are set up, the way that our our COA is structured, I can't get what I need out of our books. And that leads to the data the time spent re re re re keying the data and having to track not just budgets, but how many of you have to track designated giving in Excel because your your accounting system isn't set up to track revenues and expenditures and remainders for designated purposes? How much has come in for the new roof for the orphanage? And how much has been spent on the new roof for the orphanage and how much remains to be nobody knows out of the books. We have to go to our Excel sheet where we track the ins and the outs and the remainders for each designated purpose or or each designated gift and so on. I I I continue to see this over and over and over. So there's potential for errors and there's just so much time spent having to do all this. But yep. I should have gone to the slide first. Oh, well. There we go. And more I I will say the the the last bullet there. Probably, very few of you enjoy doing that. Very few of you most likely enjoy the keying and the keying and the keying and the keying and the double and triple and quadruple checking to hope that you catch any of the keying errors that you've made before you you present the report to the finance committee and so on. So what do we do about it? And here's here's the probably the single my single biggest counter to not only have we always done it this way, but it has to always be this way. No. It doesn't. A little bit pitchy here. But with a correctly designed chart of accounts in a purpose built nonprofit accounting system that is able to track and report on budgets, is able to track and report on donor designations or whether you call them donors or not, donors or members or congregants or attended whatever. But able to track the designations on their giving, the ability to integrate with might have seen somebody in the in the chat mention, like, what about if you have your online giving flow into your church management system and have that flow directly into your books with just a couple of clicks? Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. That is really nice. And that is exactly what we do. But one of our our biggest goals when we set up accounting system for a new customer is that we design it so that the information that you need to run your business comes directly out of your books on demand without relying on rekeying into Excel. Not to slam Excel. Like I said, I use it every day and it is great for data manipulation but it is that's exactly what it is. It's a manipulation tool. Take another sip of water and get off that soapbox for just a minute while Jess, if you see if we have any questions to. hit. We do. We have lots of wonderful questions. Joe is doing a great job keeping up with everybody. Richard's question made me laugh. He said no. Hold on. Where is it? Oh, leadership is gonna have all kinds of questions. So how do we move away from spreadsheets? So we can answer that here in just a second. But yeah. Also, the other question that just keeps coming in is, will we have recording? So just a reminder, yes, this is being recorded, and you will receive the recording tomorrow. And you can pass this along to your leadership if they have so many questions, and they can watch this. But, also, you would you will have the opportunity opportunity to connect with someone from our team if you need additional questions answered. So, yeah, hopefully, Joe is addressing your questions. He's he's doing a great job. I'm watching questions come in and be answered. So I'm answering what I can, but like I mentioned at the very beginning of this presentation, I am learning along with you. So some of these questions, I don't know the answer to. So, anyway, yeah, we're good to move on, Jonathan. I don't I don't see anything else that needs to be called out right at the right this moment. Okay. I do see Jacqueline's question. What accounting system would would we recommend? Ours. But. like a like a that we'll we'll we'll hit that at the end. Yeah. I'll I'll. try to keep my promise to Jess and not spend the next two hours not to spend the next two hours talking about all the goodness specifically that we do. I'm sorry, yes. Jess. I will say that these screenshots that are on some of these slides, not all of them, but some of these screenshots, when when you're looking at these and they look like product shot, they are from our software. And so, you know, some of these smarter fixes are just a general best practice. Like, in the industry, generally speaking, if this is what you're if the miss this is the mistake you're seeing over and over again, consider these smarter fixes. And then, for example, on this particular slide, that's being showcased for what that looks like in our particular software. And so just kinda keep that in mind as you're as you're looking at these slides. But, yes, Ministry Brands has a fantastic accounting software that is actually purposed for churches. So we we would recommend that just purely based on the niche challenges that that you are facing in the church. And I I I clicked over to the q and a tab just to see that, yep, Joe is doing yeoman's work on the the the q and a tab as expected. I I I do wanna say, Joy, Joy Murphy, I did see your question. Is this just is this just for new customers? The answer is no. If you are using our accounting system and it's not meeting your needs, maybe it was designed ten years ago, fifteen years ago, something like that, we can absolutely stand up a new instance of our accounting system, redesign the chart of accounts from scratch so that it meets your needs now and going forward. There are couple of options for what do we do about beginning balances and or transaction history that worth the discussion. I'm I'm giving long answers. Y'all you probably have figured out I don't really do short answers very well. I tend to do long answers. The short answer is no. Not just for new customers. We can we can start you over from scratch with a better chart of accounts if that's if that's what what's best. There we go. Very helpful. Okay. And did I oh, yep. We've we've touched on a lot of this. I did wanna show y'all this screenshot when it comes to as this calls out the integration that we have. Again, as Jess said, all the screenshots are from our systems. So using our systems for church management and for accounting means that on the church management side, you've got that little button there that says sync to financials and a couple of clicks and all of that days, weeks, months, whatever, how often you choose to do it. All of that activity then creates the necessary debits and credits in the accounting system. No need for rekeying and data entry and errors and time spent. We're we're doing more and more also with automated workflows. For example, we partner with a company called Avid, and they actually take over the generation of AP payments so that not only do you not cut checks on your side, you don't even have to keep check stock around if you don't want to. The the guys at Avid are really cool. I like working with them. So just again, just a couple of examples of the the ways that more things can be automated and take more and more items off of your plate and let you wear only eight hats instead of nine. Are aren't you so thankful that we've removed 12% of your hats? Okay. One more, problem category that I wanna talk about and that is okay. So now that the data is wherever it is, how do we get it out? And how do we actually make use of the data in our accounting system in a way that matters? And let me talk a little bit about that. We constantly, I see that reports are either too detailed or too vague, sometimes both at once. Either the the executive pastor is not interested in line by line item detail, but that's all we can give them. Or the the the the chair of the finance committee does need to see line item detail but departmentalized and we can only do a summary. You you we can come up with a dozen other examples of reports that don't match the needs of their audience. And now as we get into what do you mean financials that don't tell a story or or limited visibility for leadership? What I try to get all of my clients away from doing is generating the reports that have here here we go again. Generating the ports that have always been generated because they've always been the reports that we've done. Right? Anytime I would design a new chart of account structure and they would say, well, we need to be able my client would say, we need to be able to do this. We need to be able to do this. We need to be my question is always, okay. Tell me who is using the information that we're talking about to drive business decisions? And that question throws a lot of people. In a lot of cases, we'll hand the finance committee or the executive pastor or whomever, we'll hand them the the monthly reports and there's numbers on a page and they look and they say, Okay. And there's nothing in there that will give them the insight into the the business, the finance, the operations of the church that will allow them to make appropriate decisions going forward or adjust midstream. It's data on a page that doesn't relate to how they need to think through the business of the church. And no matter how long it takes us to generate those reports and put the data in from them in in from them, the data is not actually usable. Kind of a waste of time. I hate to say it. The out of date information is also big. And here again, this is why this is why I did not tell you the the name of the church and the school where I where I'm at. Out of date information. How often do we have a booster club meeting where I'm the treasurer? Once a month. I present reports once a month. As soon as that meeting is over, they will not the the rest of the booster club, the rest of the board members will not have any insight into our financial position for another month. Who knows what's gonna happen in the next thirty days? There's no way for them to get information other than me synthesizing everything into Excel and then presenting that to them at our monthly meeting. They're completely in the dark the rest of the time. And and because of how we have to do things, I have to get reports from the church finance office and synthesize that into Excel. By the time I get the report and I get that done and then I present it to the rest of the board, the information is already at least a couple of weeks out of date by the time I'm presenting it. So and it's it's there's no way to adjust midstream. There's there's no way to make smart business decisions when there's such a lag in critical information like that. And we we we see what that leads to. The the either slower or complete inability for decision making along with I mean, none of our none of our pastors, I would assume I mean, dangerous to make assumptions, but here I go anyway. I would assume that none of our pastors like being in the dark or or. like being handed a report once a month. And even if it's up to date at that point, one week later, no idea where we're at now. And I assume and hope and pray that none of our pastors say, the stewardship of the God given resources through the congregation, that's not really part of my job. Hopefully hopefully, all of our pastors have embraced stewardship and accountability when it comes to the the earthly resources that we've been granted. Mhmm. But they have to have the tools to enable that if they're going to fairly complete their jobs. Yeah. K? Yeah. Yeah. Let me double down on that a. little bit. I feel like, you know, it's one thing to be, you know, doing really well as a church, and and, hopefully, you have cultivated a a culture of generosity at your church, and and you have a lot of gifts coming in. That is wonderful. Right? So you have done a great job at facilitating stewardship amongst your congregation. There is another layer of stewardship responsibility on the church to say, well, now what are we doing with this money? Right? And so leading by example in this way, having this level of transparency across the board, right, with with a trusted board, with trusted financial people, but then being able to provide that level of transparency to your givers if you so choose. Right? So having these reports in a way that are readily available, always up to date to say, hey. This is where we're at with this particular, you know, campaign. Let's say you're doing a building campaign. Not only at this point do you know how much has come in, how much has been specifically designated to that expansion project, but now you're able to track all of the expenses, everything that's going out. That is amazing, and that is true stewardship. And so being able to leverage a platform like this where we're reducing those errors, we're reducing the the the, you know, human touch in some of these areas that can be automated in a much more reliable way, I think speaks volumes for churches that say, hey. We're gonna prioritize adding this level of software to our ministry because we want to up our stewardship in that way. So just wanted to make a call out for that. Anyone who's come to any of my webinars or listened to any of our podcasts, y'all know that I am, like, a huge believer in fostering a culture of generosity and stewardship at your church, but this is kind of the flip side of that. We're not we're not right now focusing on your donors or your givers. This is focusing on you, church. What are you doing with those finances, and how are you walking in stewardship with the money that's coming in and out of your church? So off my soapbox now, but this was this is my moment to shine. Nicely done. All accurate. I love it. And I I I see a couple of questions that I I do wanna touch on. Yeah. Richard, especially give me give me just one second on the the the how to be more transparent to the givers. That's a really good question. And I've I've flipped over to a side for a a slide for us focused on, alright. Well, what do we do about this? So it it probably makes sense at this point that having reports built off of a properly designed chart of accounts, that step one. And the ability to adjust reports to different audiences to go detailed here and summarized here or generate a departmentalized income statement for our department heads if we have different departments. It it's the ability to once the data is in the system, the ability to slice and dice the data that's in the system to present that very same data. It's all just our debits and credits. But we've got to have the ability to slice and dice the data to present the same data different ways to different audiences. Again, without relying on Excel and the the the time consumption and the errors that that causes. I wanna call out self-service. If we are in a in a spot where once a month, we provide printed reports to the pastoral staff and to the finance committee and and whomever else, We are we are we're still in that situation where information is out of date essentially as soon as that report is printed. Here in 2026 with a modern accounting system like ours, there is no reason not to have your pastoral staff, your finance committee, and anyone else who is interested and trustworthy. Richard, that trustworthy part is is a a little lead into what I'll give you. No reason not to have the pastoral staff, the finance committee, and everyone else who's trustworthy sign into your accounting system directly and run whatever reports, whatever dashboards they want. Two thing two parts of that sentence just cause some of you to gasp almost audibly even though everybody's muted. Number one is, Jonathan, are you insane? We don't want people going into our accounting system when they're not accountants. I want them to go in as view only users. I don't want. any of them to have the ability ability to add data or to edit data or to delete data. My goodness. But the ability to view data is something that should absolutely be shared and encouraged so that the pastoral staff does not receive a printed report from you once per month. But the pastoral staff can sign into the accounting system nine times a day if they want to and view up to the minute information and make whatever decisions they, as the pastoral staff, think they need to make with the information that you've got in there for them. That self serve view only view only, but self serve ability is critical for the work that you've done keeping accurate books for that work to actually be worthwhile and usable for decision making. I keep driving back to that point. So that's that's the first are you kidding me, Jonathan? That's the first objection to let people get in there. The second one is, Jonathan, our our executive pastor is 86 years old. How exactly do you think we're gonna teach him to run this big, bad, modern, powerful, flexible accounting system? Totally fair question. The answer is he doesn't have to know all of the system. What he needs is the ability to sign in, which is a thing, but with single sign on, that that's not the worst thing. Sign in, see a screen, and the ability to click here and click here and get the information that he cares about. Done. And a modern well designed accounting system off, like ours, offers exactly that. And it's such a time saver for you, the accounting staff, to allow people to self serve. And it expands the transparency. It expands the usability of the data. There's no downside. Dangerous for me to say. I get that. There's really no downside to letting more people view the data and use the data as long as it's trustworthy. And if the data is not trustworthy, that's on this audience to fix, but that's fine because. we fixed that. Different problem. Yes. Different. different problem, but still a fixable problem. Yes. And so oh, let me where's my cursor, Richard? I promise I would come back to that. How to be more transparent to the givers? We probably would not allow our congregants or members, whatever we wanna call them, to sign directly into one of our systems even as view only. We might. We might not. It's physically possible. I don't I couldn't name a church off the top of my head that has chosen to allow that for a variety of reasons. But but with a modern properly designed accounting or a church management system, If someone calls and says, hey. I've I've donated towards the the the new roof for the orphanage. I'd like to know how we're doing on that. How much has come in and and how much have we spent and how much do we still need to raise against the budget? When that call comes in with a modern, properly designed accounting system, answering that question for the congregant who's on the phone is a matter of a couple of clicks and a few seconds to let the data churn and present up to date info. So while while we probably won't let them let our members self serve, it we can make it much, much easier for the pastoral staff or the receptionist or whomever to serve the congregants questions using the same system even though your congregants are not clicking the buttons themselves. K. So helpful. We've got lots of fun shout outs in the in the in the chat. This is resonating. People are are so thrilled to get time back. I do wanna pause real quick because we just kinda glazed over Avid, and, we've had a. couple questions. Avid Exchange is one of our partners. There is a an integration within our accounting software for accounts payable. And so the two specific questions, does Avid allow for approval for disbursement from check signers? Yes. I believe the answer is yes. Yeah. That. that's yeah. There's there's an an approval path in there. Okay. Oh, And if you're go. if heard Joe. Attaboy. yeah. Yeah. And then if you are wanting more information about Avid, we do have information on that at ministrybrands.com. I believe the handle is forward slash partners. It might be I don't know. But it is on our website. If you want specifically more information about our partnership with Avid, you can also set up that call a little bit later and find out more there as well. The only other one, the only other question that wanted to to well, let's see. How many slides we got left? A few. Where are we at? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, let's keep moving just for the sake of time, but I did wanna address that because we had a few a few people ask about AVID. So we'll keep going. Okay. And we're we we really are getting close to done here, which is I mean, a sales rep can talk until dark, but I'm I'm I've I've been controlling myself pretty well, Jess. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. And, so, Jonathan. Before you move on, there is one more question I wanna address. real quick. So I'm just gonna I'm just gonna go ahead and just publicly say this. We we currently have we have Shelby Financials. Many of you have have been part of the the Shelby Financials family. We still offer Shelby. We we are also also doing Ministry Brands accounting. Those platforms are going to be almost exactly identical. This is really just a Us just moving everybody kind of more into the Ministry Brands family, but the the platforms are similar. And once you connect with that dedicated account executive, they will help meet exactly the need for your church. So any further questions on that, feel free to ask in the chat or the q and a. We would love to address those for you, but just wanted to kinda call that out too because I I don't want there to be confusion. We're not blatantly calling out Shelby or Ministry Brands accounting. We're we're just talking about our accounting software, but the features across both platforms are very robust and almost identical. So just wanted to go ahead and call that out and make sure we're not confused. And yet, if if you are already using Shelby and you're like, oh, wait a minute. You're talking about Shelby? I can't do any of this. Like we said, let's do a redesign and refresh the chart of accounts. Because probably if you've been using Shelby for a while, more than likely, it's been built in such a way that it know it may have met your needs ten years ago, but no longer does. We can fix that. And we can get you with the the the system that you're already using as Shelby, We can get you to what I'm talking about here with proper design and then, frankly, proper training as well. So. I have yet to talk to a single user who knows a 100% of the system. There's always more you can be doing with it. You just need one of us to show you what it is and how to use it. Love it. Okay. And so the yeah. We've touched on the this portion of the the how you can help. I do wanna call out that the the the screenshot, not super easy to read, but in our system, if we want a departmentalized income statement instead of all departments treated as one, it's as simple as one click and then regenerate the report. And then I'm I I keep driving back to this. We don't wanna generate reports just to show somebody some data and then watch every everybody just shrug and do what they've always done. We wanna generate reports that will drive decision making and better the church and better the stewardship and the accountability around our resources because the data is usable and actionable. Okay. So the our our, summary here, you gotta have the foundation set correctly. If the chart of accounts doesn't meet your needs, essentially, nothing else that we that we've been talking about is gonna matter. The. foundation has to be strong. The strong foundation then leads to lack of need for Excel, lack of need for rekeying if because we're able to leverage automatic workflows, integrations with other systems that are done with a click instead of with rekeying, all leading to that that foundation then leading to usable and actionable reports that we present to people. Yeah. Maybe. Or that they go generate for themselves on demand. Even better. Alright. This a this this is is what Jess has been promising. So I'll I'll hush for a minute. So we obviously have some folks interested in in learning a little bit more. And, again, Joe is doing a great job. We do have some some questions. So, Jonathan, actually, while I'm chitchatting for the next maybe five minutes as we wrap up, if you see anything in there you wanna snag and answer via chat, feel free to help Joe out. That'd be fantastic. But in the meantime, here is a full list of features that are available through our accounting platforms. So if you have interest in learning more, and this is really truly like a low pressure situation, we just want to make that time and that meeting available to you to connect with a dedicated representative who can help with your church size, your church needs. And so you can scan the QR code. That'll take you to a a real concise landing page. There's not a whole lot on there. We've got just kind of a recap of the information you learned today, and then there is a form on there. The fields on the form are required because that allows us to plug you with the correct representative based on your church size, and they'll be able to help you very specifically versus just everyone getting on the the phone with anyone. Our reps have a lot of training in their specific area, and so we wanna make sure we connect you with the correct person. So thank you all so much for being such an engaged audience. This was fantastic. We had a lot of fun. So thanks for being here really quick. We would really appreciate your participation in a quick survey. I'm gonna go ahead and launch that now. Let's do I've somehow had two in here. We're gonna do this one. Okay. So if you would just take a minute. Jonathan and I cannot see your results on there, so be truthful, please, with with us. We we really want you to to be honest here and let us know. We're also trying to capture if you'd be interested in, if there's other topics you'd like to talk about. One of the questions on that survey is, would you be interested in a live event where we can answer some accounting style questions? So let us know if that's of interest to you. This is something that we're exploring for this year, and so if that sounds cool and fun, go ahead and let us know in that survey. So we'll leave that open for the remaining time of the webinar, so feel free to answer that. I believe you get a pop up. Again, we don't see that information right now. We'll see results later, but take your time on that survey. Also, you will be receiving the recording as we have mentioned multiple times, so that will come to your inbox tomorrow. In that same email, we will have a blog post. That's super helpful. A lot of the same stuff we covered today, maybe a little bit extra. And then lastly, we have an incredible resource for you all. This is a free ebook. It is robust. It includes so much good information. This is our blueprint for church accounting, and so you can download that. It is absolutely free. Kaylee, there is not a hard copy of that book, but it is it is downloaded in a PDF format. So, girlfriend, if you would like to print that out and read through it, by all means, go ahead and do that. Again, that is a free all of these are free resources. And then beyond that, like I said, you can check out a little bit more about AVID, on our website, on our partner's page. I can I can't grab that link while I'm talking to you because I'll go completely silent? I can't do two things at once, but it's not difficult to find on our page. And so, yeah, Avid Exchange has been a wonderful, wonderful partnership. We are so grateful for them. They joined us in our Healthy Church Summit back in September, and we work closely with Wes Herms. And he he as a human being is wonderful too. So just all around, great company, great people. So, Jamie, the PDF download will come in the email. Yes. That is correct. And then, Richard, I see you saying that you didn't get the download. So if you have at any point unsubscribed from our marketing emails, that's probably why. So please just let us know. Richard, if you would email me, it's jessica.moore@ministrybrands.com. Let me know, and we'll try to get that PDF over to you if the download didn't make it to your inbox. But beyond that, thank you all so much for joining. We are at the top of the hour, so we're gonna go ahead and wrap up. But, hopefully, this was helpful to you, and we look forward to to talking with you and your church if you're if you're looking to explore our accounting software. Thank you, Jonathan, so much for your time and your energy and your your knowledge, personal knowledge. This has been a super fun webinar. I appreciate your time so much. Glad to do it. Always enjoy it. Be okay. I I see what you're saying about the nerdy part. That's fine. Alright, y'all. With that, we are going to wrap up. Thank you again for being here. Bye bye.