HomeDigital MinistryManagement (ChMS)How to Reach Maximum Security With Your Church Finances

How to Reach Maximum Security With Your Church Finances

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Every dime that comes through a church is priceless, especially when funds are derived from generous donations and the hard-working hands of volunteers. Therefore, churches need the best expense management tools to avoid any excess spending or misuse of church funds and are turning to expense management software to track spending and easily manage payments.

This article will address how using this software can provide confidence and peace by creating a secure financial process that has real-time visibility, automated expense reporting, smart budgeting and organized pre-approvals.

Real-Time Visibility & Church Spending

When staff members make purchases on behalf of a church organization, they typically use personal credit cards and later file expense reports or submit receipts to their manager. The manager in charge of finances then accounts for each purchase/expense report by the end of each month. This means church executives are not able to see the exact spending amount until after all of the reports are filed at the end of the month. Furthermore, if reports have errors, it becomes harder to address that situation when the purchases happened weeks before. In truth, this is a reactive process with no real-time visibility.

Divvy expense management software organizes all the components of church spending and budgeting into one convenient location and allows you to see all transactions in real-time. How does this work? Instead of having staff use personal credit cards, you can give them individual Divvy cards. A Divvy card is similar to a corporate card, except it is much more accessible and secure–and it is free to use. Any time a purchase is made on a Divvy card, managers can see the transaction in real-time using the Divvy web-app. This way, financial managers can account for every dime in real-time and ensure church funds are used exactly as desired.

Church 1

Automated Expense Reports

Once staff have access to their Divvy card, they no longer have to worry about keeping track of receipts or submitting expense reports after each purchase. While this expense management software tracks each purchase in real-time, it also compiles and logs all of the information from each purchase that's needed to file an expense report. At the end of the month, instead of gathering reports and receipts from every purchase, accounts payable staff and managers can simply upload the files from the Divvy expense management software transaction history into their accounting software. Divvy is compatible with most of the widely used accounting software on the market. This simplifies the process and prevents any expense reporting errors–a common occurrence when using a manual process to file expense reports.

Church 2

Smart Budgeting

The best way to secure church funds, or any financial plan for that matter, comes with using a smart budgeting system. Budgeting can be a grueling and intimidating task on its own, however, there are budgeting tools that make it extremely easy to set up, organize, and manage budgets.

We recommend managers use Divvy for this as well. When you first set up your free Divvy account, you can create budgeting categories and assign people to certain budgets. For example, you can create a budget called “office supplies,” assign it to the staff members in charge of clerical work and give them access to the office supplies budget to use when they need new pens or paper. You can monitor each budget and set limits on each budget to prevent any overspending.

Organized Pre-Approval

What is your current process to approve church purchases? Word of mouth? Email? Forms? Etc? Establishing a pre-approval process is helpful by creating a consistent and organized purchasing process for all employees in order to avoid any miscommunications or difficult confrontations. An expense management tool can help ease this process. For example, if a church were to use Divvy, each employee has a personal account, card and access to the mobile app.

In the app, employees can send a “request” for funds from a specific budget and managers can approve or reject the request with a swipe of the finger. Using a software tool like this will not only simplify your process, but it will hold everyone accountable to get a processed approval before spending church funds.

Church 4

Divvy is definitely not the only expense management software out there, but it is the only one that has real-time visibility, includes an organized pre-approval process, and is completely free to use. What's more, Divvy will give you $100 just to demo the software.  You can find our more here. Feel free to explore more expense management tools and choose the one that is the best fit for your church organization. In the end, our mission is to help secure every dime that goes through your church.

Heidi Steele
Heidi Steelehttps://getdivvy.com/
Heidi Steele works in content marketing for Divvy while finishing her bachelor's degree in PR and marketing at Brigham Young University. She loves exploring and writing pieces about the rising tech industry.

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