Church Financial Software: Do Churches Need Automated Finance Management Systems?

When it comes to the management of a Church's or non-profit organization's funds, the sheer chance of a fraud is unthinkable.Not to mention how the emotional and mental anguish caused by unfounded allegations can really disrupt the continual processes offinance management. Often such issues can be prevented by writing down some clear policies and establishing accountability. But unlike private organizations, these institutes do not have enough assets to hire dedicated resources for the task, making accountability elusive. The simplest answer to all these issues is to establish an automated system.

Such a system will not only reduce the overhead of managing all the funds manually but will also make it easy to access the required information all the time. There are many other aspects to this, which we will explore in following points.

Easy ReportingPost-fundraising events, investors and other authorities often ask for formal reports on the funds gathered. Earlier it was easy to satisfy their queries using a manual report with little explanatory data. But now expectations have risen since it has become so inexpensive to create proper reports. Any reliable automated finance management system, aka Finance co-ordinator, can do the task for you, that too in less time. So there is no need of making a separate spreadsheet, and screening the entire database to do the task anymore. Such systems can do the entire task for you, that too in much less time. With all these facilities available at a rather affordable price range, there’s no excuse of not using a system like this.

TransparencyA comprehensive finance tool for a church would allow the setting of multiple view accesses. In any case,any automated tool is far more transparent than a huge database. What more?These databases often contain non-standard and redundant data, making it easy for someone with malicious intent to hide important information. But with an automated system in place, it is always easy to maintain the normalization of the entire database making the prospects of future scaling easier and more profitable.

Easy Transfer of JobA finance software runs with certain standard rules and regulations. It, therefore, requires little efforts to transfer the relevant information from one person to another. In short, it makes the process of knowledge transfer rather easy and much less time-consuming. Thus even if the entire organization is being run by volunteers, they can take care of it without the worry of raising incompatibility issues.

Better IntegrationAn automated system often has more scope of integrating with third-party service providers like banks and other financial institutes. They are also more likely to integrate with other tools that are being used by different touchpoints. In fact, most of such tools already some integrated with major financial institutions, making fund transfer an effortless task.

Real-Time Account and Database SynchronisationSome of the more advanced finance co-ordinator systems have the interface of double entry accounting. In fact, some of them are designed specifically to meet the requirements of churches and charities. That is, they have sections customized to manage the accounts of regular fund givers, and associating certain membership benefits to them. They easily manage the accounting part of the business while also updating the database with the required data. So, in the end, there's nothing for the account or fund manager to do but to make the entries in the real-time, and when required, gain the insights in the form of reports. It cannot be more effortless!

So, coming back to the original question- Do Churches Need Automated Finance Management Systems? Well, yes. Especially now when things are still easy to implement. It is the perfect time to get on board with digital solutions and streamline the tasks. Later when there will be more data with data analytics, it would be hard to leverage all those functionalities if the right foundation is not already set.

The author of the article is working with Data Developments– top destination for software needs of churches and charities.