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Uh first question my church is in the early stages of combining the finance and stewardship teams what advice can you give to maximize buy-in and support of all the board members so i’m thinking that that question has to do with um you’re you’re pulling both the generosity and the the management of uh the uh the giving once you have it onto the same team how do you
Build buy-in we’ve got two coaches that do that all the time would one of you like to answer that question now i’ll take a stab at that joe i i would say that i think one of the important things uh certainly if this is a brand new uh committee if you will routine is you know to a certain degree what i would call create a charter why are we here why are we seeking
To accomplish that’s kind of the first piece uh and then there has to be some training and mentoring that recognizes hey you’ve been asked to be on this team because of this unique contribution and everybody on the team is going to bring a different value proposition a different contribution and again that just comes right out of uh you know paul’s writings of
You know as a as a complete body we can’t all beat the hand so we want to recognize you know the the number crunchers versus the storytellers we want to recognize the the creative worship people versus you know the uh the expository and the contribution to uh just that diversity on the team to bring that holistic stewardship generosity finance component it into
A nice blend but it’s not that everybody’s going to be the same or think the same send those expectations up front and what we hope to accomplish together and then allowing time for those personalities and giftedness to really marinate together is what will really help that become that team become a high capacity high impact team one of the things factors we
Didn’t talk about today was entrepreneurs entrepreneurs will serve on very large church boards and committees because that’s principally the works being done by the staff and they’re sharing their wisdom and knowledge as the church size gets smaller entrepreneur entrepreneurs who are often some of your best givers are less and less likely to serve on a long-term
Committee it is just not in their makeup tool to do that and one of the advantages to having a separate generosity team is there’s so much action going on there that you can usually keep their attention another way to leverage them is if they won’t serve on your team um identify sort of a blue ribbon team to solve a problem uh within the church and let that
Report back to your finance team or another team in the church and draw in an entrepreneur there second question are outsourcing the finance positions like um or described by cape and krauss do these people serve remotely or do they come on site so you’ll find both primarily we’re now remote there are times when we’ll show up on site so it depends on the client
The situation and the needs but we are able by and large to do good work remotely and have a workforce that’s pretty well distributed throughout the usa we are finding at horizon when we’re doing healthsource work once you build a relationship with a client more and more of our work is being requested to happen online because it doesn’t require volunteers and
Staff to to come in especially when you’re mixing the two together horizons itself we have a distributed team so even our administrative team the fractional people are off site but even some of our full-time people are scattered around the country and we’re taking advantage of technology to allow us to hire the very best person regardless of their um their
Location there’s a question um from rick about recommendations for accounting system that should be uh considered and rick we don’t know uh okay now he goes on and says uh for a church 500 or 3000 uh to three million three million to five million and 5 million to uh to 10 million so it does matter the size of the church i’ll start out by saying um that most
Smaller churches that are say 3 million and under and i recognize 3 million is probably in the top five or six percent of of churches um they are using a church management software with a built-in uh general ledger more and more uh some of those um newer systems that are out there will allow plug-in of other kinds of uh accounting software but that’s the most
Common in the in the smaller churches and most churches don’t particularly like their church management software um rock rms is probably a uh the one uh that’s different from that but you’re required while that software is free you are required to have at least a fractional uh programmer to be able to support that so it tends to be churches over a million dollars
That use that as you get larger what do you see larger churches that are able to program some of their own systems what do you see them using as an accounting system so i won’t rank them in order by size i don’t want the software makers to take exception with us but i’ll just give you maybe the four most popular names that i see coming through our book right now
It would be sage intact netsuite blackbaud aplos and they’re all very different from one another it’s not not cookie cutter takes a lot of discussion to peel it those four apart and most are only going to work in certain circumstances so there’s a lot of names and a lot of thought to go into that but joe i’ll just add those names to them access to what we see
Right now and some of that has to do with the ability to work with other software that you have i do see churches that will run accounting software separate from their church management system and those are the names that i see most often use blackbaud primarily used with uh in the non-profit world but i think that’s a good list well it is now two o’clock i
Want to thank you all for joining us let theresa if you could put out the slide that shows the cape and cross resource that we’ve been working from for the last of our seven webinars stan and dave thank you for being with us today any closing remarks but john indeed it has been a privilege just to be a part of this uh series with you thank you for what you and
Your team at rights and stewardship do uh it’s just so much fun to work together in the kingdom to work together with churches and to uh you know see how god is using various churches and various communities to have great impact and uh again thank you for the opportunity to to join you on these webinars over this past year well you’re welcome um we are huge fans
Of cape and cross they are most definitely a vetted uh ministry partner in the sense that we without a hesitation or reservation i recommend them for uh churches and uh non-profits um i do want to say that there are a lot of resources out there particularly in the accounting world just like in the architectural world i if you’re going to interview somebody ask
Them what their church experience is tell us church clients you work with and talk to those church clients because it really is a specialty in the same way if you’re a non-profit you want to ask that question thank you for joining us and we’ll be doing more in the future foreign
Transcribed from video
Q&A Session – Money and Ministry: Financial Operations, Finance Committees, and Generosity Teams By Horizons Stewardship
