Are You Truly Ready to Sell Your Business?

Are You Truly Ready to Sell Your Business?

The decision to sell your business is a massive one. It will not only require practical time and energy but an emotional and financial investment. You will need to pay lawyers and other advisors, and it will demand time from your chief operators and directors. As you collectively navigate this significant transition, anxiety will heighten, and questions will fly. Many owners start down the path towards a sale, only to get cold feet and determine that “the time just wasn’t right.” This can be detrimental to the stability of the business, the team, and future sales. So before you begin the process of preparing your business to sell, pause and ask yourself these questions to make sure you’re truly ready to say goodbye.

1. How much of your personal fulfillment do you derive from your business?

Perhaps you built this business from the ground up, tooth and nail. Or maybe you purchased it in a fledgling phase and nurtured it to success. Whatever the path, you put in years of focused, dedicated energy and care into building a structure, team, and business that you are proud of, and rightfully so! It has probably become more than just your job; it is part of who you are. So how much of your self-worth, identity, and happiness comes from it? How much joy do you get from walking into work on Monday morning, solving complex problems around your conference table, or coming up with a unique solution for your clients? Would you miss the travel, the pace, or the challenge? Who are you when you aren’t at the helm? It’s essential to recognize this business’s role in your personal life – not just the time it takes but the sense of worth it brings you. If it plays a massive role in your personal life, and really defines you, actually handing it off at the end of a sales process may be a lot harder than you anticipate. 

2. What will you do with your time?

Elite athletes call this “visualization.” They imagine step by step, moment by moment, the perfect swing of the bat or spin of the dive. Being able to picture something clearly in your mind helps bring it to fruition. It allows your brain to rehearse what it will think and feel when the behavior comes to pass. Can you imagine retirement? What will you do? Where will you go? What does your family imagine? How will you fill your weekdays? What will you do with the money? If these images are vague and incomplete, it might be a sign that – when push comes to shove – you won’t follow through with a sale because you don’t know what is coming next. We are creatures of habit, innately designed to prefer routine to change. Knowing exactly what you’ll do that first Monday morning when you don’t have to set the alarm is an important step to preparing your mind for a shif

3. What problem are you solving?

Sometimes a complete sale is not the solution. But to know this, you have to articulate your problem. Do you want more time with your family? Is the leadership responsibility bringing you too much stress? Is your industry growing rapidly, and you recognize you don’t have the skills (or desire) to scale? These problems can be solved in many ways through partial sales, staffing changes, or operational restructuring to alleviate your actual pain point while retaining your involvement in the things that still bring you life. Selling your business doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision. But you need to know what type of sale/transaction you are looking for before you go down the path.


As modern accountants and bookkeepers, we are here to ensure your accounts are for whatever “next step” you envision for your business. But we aren’t only your outsourced finance team – we are also trusted advisors and partners in your success. If you know you’re nearing the time to sell your business, reach out to us. Of course, we can help you prepare your financial records to ensure you get the most value from what you have worked so hard to build, but we also can help you think through some of the non-financial considerations at play when selling your business. We’ve seen it before, done it before, and are here to help.

Accurate Bookkeeping = Committed Stewardship

Accurate Bookkeeping = Committed Stewardship

Whether you are an international non-profit organization operating with a staff of hundreds or a small local church with under a hundred members – when your organization is running on the donations and good faith of others, good stewardship matters. 

Transparency Builds Trust.

We believe good stewardship begins with trust. As a non-profit, your organization functions not just as a business but as a community venture. By trusting you with their financial gifts, resources, and time, your donors have a personal stake in your organization’s success. When they have questions about where funds and resources are being allocated, there should be clear and open transparency, just as there would be in any partnership. 

This is where accurate bookkeeping comes in. Messy, unpredictable books mean that money could be unaccounted for. Even if it is unintentional, unorganized bookkeeping can and will lead to mistrust in leadership. 

Successful non-profits know that when it comes to finances, they are operating as a partnership with their donors. Trust is essential for this relationship between organizational leadership and financial partners to stay healthy and grow.

Vision Requires Resources.

Every non-profit organization begins as a vision, but a vision needs resources to come to life. An organization must have practical tools such as money and manpower to operate. As a non-profit, you often must rely on monetary donations and volunteers with particular skill sets to execute your goals.

You’ll earn the trust of your financial partners and volunteers by wisely managing the resources at your disposal, ensuring they are not expended too slowly or quickly. This doesn’t just pertain to your budget – wisely managing your organization’s resources also means valuing your staff and volunteers’ time.

A vision isn’t a static thing – it stretches, shifts, and grows along with your organization’s resources. Accessibility to accurate books is imperative as your vision and goals evolve and adjust over time. This transparency not only builds trust, it also honors the givers by caring wisely for the resources they give you, allowing you to earn the right to ask them for more.

Information is Empowering.

Budgeting, like many other disciplines, sometimes gets a bad rap for its “restrictive” lens. We tend to think of budgeting as what we can’t do, rather than important, empowering information that frees us to do more of what we value most.

We believe that good stewardship and accounting of finances is the opposite of limiting – it’s actually freeing.

Wisely stewarding your resources through accurate bookkeeping allows you to celebrate and give more readily because you know exactly how much money you have and from where. 

The same is true when it comes to your partnerships with donors and volunteers. Good stewardship shows that you honor their investment in your organization’s vision, whether with time or money or both and that you value a partnership built on transparency in trust. When your donors feel honored and like valued team members with a common mission, their commitment to your organization will grow.

How to Structure Accounting for Multiple Personal Properties

How to Structure Accounting for Multiple Personal Properties

What you need to know about managing the finances for your growing real estate investments.

Purchasing multiple properties can be an excellent investment path, allowing you to grow your assets while potentially making some extra income at the same time through leasing. However, owning and managing multiple properties can become a pain point for you and your CPA when it comes to bookkeeping, particularly when tax season rolls around each year.

It can become complex and confusing to track income and expenses for individual properties when they are all kept under one Quickbooks file, making filing taxes a nightmare.

At System Six, we believe you can achieve accounting success by understanding the proper tax structure for multiple properties, keeping your individual properties’ bookkeeping separately organized, and utilizing available up-to-date technology to keep your bookkeeping balanced and easy to track.

As an owner of multiple properties, one roadblock that may surprise you when tax season arrives is realizing too late the headache that filing all your properties on one tax file can bring you and your CPA. Whether or not multiple properties are LLC’s, filing each entity individually will make the accounting process much less confusing. Setting yourself up for success starts with making sure you are structuring your bookkeeping correctly.

How to Structure Your Property Accounts

Each of your properties should ideally have its own Quickbooks file and profit/loss/balance sheet. Trying to keep track of each property’s expenses and income streams under one personal bookkeeping file is potentially a costly discrepancy just waiting to happen. You can safeguard your assets and investments by organizing your properties’ bookkeeping individually (not to mention your CPA will thank you for making their job much more time-efficient)!

If you use your multiple properties as a source of income by leasing them out, it will serve you well to open individual banking accounts for your properties. Separate lines of credit and bill pay systems for your properties will make expected costs such as utility and cable bills easily trackable and accounted for.

Sometimes owning multiple properties becomes even more complicated – what about situations where you have multiple properties under individual entities that income from your properties has to be regularly allocated to?

Utilizing class and location tracking will give you another valuable layer of data to help you precisely track how much revenue from your properties needs to be allocated to an overhead entity. Class and location tracking is an opt-in feature on accounting software, like Quickbooks, allowing users to group expenses or invoices by location and department.

Even though structuring your accounts and bookkeeping individually will undoubtedly keep your accounts safer, more organized, and trackable, we understand that it can be overwhelming for property owners to tackle that front-end work of setting up individual bookkeeping, tax files and lines of credit for their multiple properties. This is especially true for property owners who have been keeping their properties’ accounts on one Quickbooks and tax file and want to restructure their bookkeeping to keep their properties’ individual bookkeeping and tax work separate from each other.

You don’t have to tackle this alone! Here at System Six, we are passionate about utilizing the latest technology and tools available to help our clients with multiple properties keep their bookkeeping organized and balanced. Let’s chat.

How to Simplify Small Business Tax Prep

How to Simplify Small Business Tax Prep

At Systems Six, we recognize that feelings of stress and being overwhelmed are commonplace for many small business owners during tax season, which is why we want to equip you with principles to simplify your tax prep. On a micro level, your taxes are impacted by daily transactions: running payroll, writing invoices, paying vendors — each of which look back upon actions previously done. Zooming out to a macro level, the same data needed to execute your taxes will also be needed in the future if your business gets audited, you need financing, or are looking to sell. When new seasons of business or big decisions come knocking, we want you to be prepared. Here are three tips our expert bookkeepers recommend to simplify your tax prep and serve your goals on micro and macro levels:

1. Use proper digital record keeping systems

The foundation of your tax prep is the same systems you use to accomplish tasks like payroll and paying bills; they must be organized and accessible. We recommend using online, cloud-based tools. Our team advocates for Quickbooks to be your central online hub through which all other platforms connect. Using other platforms like Bill.com for bills, Ally for receipts, and Sharefile for shared documents will complement Quickbooks and assist in managing an efficient and accurate paperless accounting system. Finally, Gusto, a time-tracking and payroll system, is recommended by our team. At the end of the year, Gusto will send W-2’s to each of your employees digitally. By using these systems, your books will be ready for a tax preparing CPA to effortlessly step in and carry out your taxes without needing to spend hours digging for correct information.

2. Maintain bookkeeping hygiene 

Using a simplified, cloud-based system for the foundation of your tax prep is essential; however, it can be easy for your books to become messy without upkeeping these systems. We recommend performing weekly and monthly upkeep tasks to ensure that your files stay organized, your receipts are all accounted for, and your books remain clean. Staying on top of these day-to-day tasks will aid in preparing your business for tax season. Ignoring the stack of receipts throughout the year will only lead to panic when your CPA comes knocking.

3. Reconcile your Quickbooks account

Reconciling your books is an easy task, yet it makes a profound impact when it comes to having truthful and accurate books. Comparing your books with your bank statement brings accountability to your work.  Quickbooks is a phenomenal online tool, but the IRS begins with your source documents and builds from the ground up to validate your books. Therefore, reconciliation is essential to the promotion of transparency and accuracy with your bookkeeping. 


Tax prep doesn’t have to be overwhelming, but it requires organized, daily bookkeeping practices to ensure accurate data. By using digital platforms, maintaining the hygiene of those platforms, and reconciling those platforms with source documents, your company will have significantly simplified the preparation process.

A Tale of Two Financial Firms

A Tale of Two Financial Firms

It’s storytime on the blog this week! Do either of these tales sound familiar to you?

Flash Drives and Checkbooks

The advisors at Neighborhood Financial were losing their minds and perhaps more alarmingly, their valuable time.

It was the last Friday of the business month and, as was becoming far too common, financial advisors/business partners Jake and Lisa were scrambling to make sure their individual income accounts and their joint business account were correctly balanced.

As with most financial firms, bookkeeping needs at Neighborhood Financial were complicated. Along with individual income streams and expenses, the business partners’ joint venture account had to be regularly contributed to by both team members. They had hired an independent accountant to handle their books long ago – so why were they still not 100% sure of where their accounts stood and who owed how much to their joint account every month?

With the chime of the office doorbell, the answer to that question walked in the door with a flash drive in one hand and a stack of unsigned checks in the other.

Fred the accountant had years of experience and a winsome personality that built loyalty and trust with his customers. Unfortunately, he was falling farther and farther behind on the latest banking and bookkeeping systems and tools that make modern bookkeeping organized and efficient.

Fred the accountant still kept Jake’s and Lisa’s individual books on a flash drive that Jake and Lisa only had up-to-date access to whenever Fred was able to stop by. Fred still handled expenses and payments with paper checks, reports and receipts. It was simply the way he had always done things. 

It took up quite a lot of their valuable time for Fred to help Jake and Lisa figure out how much each of them needed to contribute to their joint account each month, and the sums varied so wildly month to month that neither of them were ever sure if they were over or under contributing. 

“There’s got to be a simpler, more dependable way to do this,” sighed Jake, rubbing his forehead after Fred left with the stack of freshly signed checks. 

“This is becoming too stressful for us individually, and for our partnership,” agreed Lisa. “I think we need to make a change.”


How much of a difference can expert help and up-to-date tools make for financial businesses?

It may surprise you that the answer is more than you might think.

Staying two steps ahead of the latest tools, systems and technologies for financial business bookkeeping is becoming a necessity for those who want to stay ahead in today’s quickly evolving world. More than ever, today’s financial businesses need expert help with a deep understanding of the most accurate and efficient bookkeeping tools on the market so that they can focus on what they value most: serving their customers.

Something we have noticed among our clients is that some businesses are leery of switching from old, manual ways of accounting because they are afraid they will lose the personal touch that comes with the long standing relationships that develop over years working with a single accountant. The learning curve of newer systems and technology seem overwhelming and businesses worry it will take too much of their time.

We believe you shouldn’t have to choose between personal attention to detail and the most efficient, up to date technology. You deserve both.

At System Six we work hard to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the best, up to date systems and tools available for bookkeeping so you don’t have to. We are also just as committed to building long lasting relationships with our clients – relationships built on great communication and personal attention to the details that matter for your business.


21st Century Solutions to 21st Century Challenges

Jake and Lisa made the decision to change how they were handling their business’ bookkeeping. 

By outsourcing their bookkeeping needs to a company that was up to date with today’s best technology, Jake and Lisa began to see immediate improvements in the areas that previously caused so much frustration and stress.

The new bookkeeping team used tools to analyze past years’ spending to project more accurately how much Jake and Lisa needed to be contributing to their joint account each month. Their payments became more consistent so there were no longer last minute surprises at the end of every month.

While trying to understand and manage the various streams of revenue and expenses at their firm had been a nightmare before, now Jake and Lisa received monthly, detailed reports broken down in a clear, concise way. Jake and Lisa finally had vital account information at their fingertips, up to date within ten days of the end of the month. No more waiting for and fussing with flash drives!

Moving their banking and bill pay systems online alleviated the need for paper checks and reports, which made Neighborhood Financial more organized and efficient than ever before.

All this led to surprisingly big benefits for Jake, Lisa and Neighborhood Financial: more peace of mind, better control of their account information, and best of all, more time to devote to their clients. 


Does this story sound familiar to you? Have you been wondering how updating the way your business handles partnership accounting would improve your work? If so, we’d love to connect with you!

A Church’s Guide to Simplifying Donor Giving Statements

A Church’s Guide to Simplifying Donor Giving Statements

For churches, the calendar year closes with exciting and reflective celebrations of Advent and Christmas. Church staff focuses on providing reflective, engaging opportunities to connect with one of the most meaningful seasons in the liturgical calendar. In the wake of the tinsel and pageants, advent calendars and carols is another milestone in the annual calendar: donor giving statements. Rather than inciting enthusiasm and joy, most church administrators and accounting volunteers cringe at the thought. These staff members could share stories of fighting with printers, chasing down missing data, and mail merging statements through all hours of the night. 

At System Six, we understand how complicated it can be to provide accurate, accessible donor information to your congregants. Every year you may find yourself thinking, “There has got to be a better way…” – there is! We have put together this comprehensive guide to help you streamline your giving throughout the year so that statements can be processed, sent, and reconciled in moments – rather than weeks. 

Four components affect church donor giving statements: 

1. How you collect donations 

2. How you track your spending 

3. How you store donor giving data 

4. How you send donor statements 

A crucial recommendation: the least number of tools needed to complete these steps, the better! Throughout this guide, we will highlight several of our favorite tools. Be sure to evaluate the tools you currently use to see if they can meet any of these needs throughout the year.

Looking for more help with Church Bookkeeping? Our team put together a helpful 3-part series: Helpful Tools, Program Spending, Budgeting.

Essential Tools for Paperless Household Accounting

Essential Tools for Paperless Household Accounting

At System Six, we believe in the power of trustworthy, high-tech tools to build financial security, transparency, and control. We have been in the cloud since the beginning. Over the years, we have transitioned hundreds of businesses, families, non-profits, and firms to cloud-based tools and seen the impact of reliability and simplicity. Paper and pen systems are notoriously clunky, unreliable, and insecure. 

We understand it can be overwhelming to sift through the myriad of available software and applications to help streamline your processes – even more so if you’re doing it for your personal finances. Accounts payable at your company probably do not pay the internet bill at your rental property or handle the landscaping company’s monthly fee. As your personal wealth, properties, and real estate grows, how do you handle the influx of papers and filing? 

Our advice? Set yourself up with reliable, trustworthy cloud-based tools. Our team has helped countless families transition away from paper tools. If you’re looking to make the jump, here are four tools we recommend adding to your personal toolbox: 

1. An accurate time tracker 

If you have employees who work on behalf of your family or are working in your home, they must have the ability to track their time accurately. It’s easy for timecards to be lost or misreported when using paper and pencil. To increase accuracy, we recommend using online software to track your employees’ time. Companies like Gusto, Quickbooks Time, and Toggl have created systems that benefit households by eliminating errors with timecards. In addition, these systems will save you time by syncing to your household’s central accounting software. Several of these tools have mobile apps for quick and easy access and can differentiate between projects, so you know where your staff invests most of their time.

2. Bill pay software 

Writing checks, creating invoices, and processing payments can be very time-consuming. A bill pay software helps streamline these practices through technology. Bill.com is the platform our Systems Six bookkeepers recommend. Not only will this software help make your accounts receivable and accounts payable more efficient, but it will also connect to Quickbooks, our suggested central office for your paperless accounting system. Bill pay software keeps your bank credentials safe by operating as a separate platform, increasing convenience and security. This way, your bills and cards can sync directly with your bank account without giving away your login credentials. 

3. A shared space for files

When making the transition to paperless accounting, it can be challenging to resist the urge to keep all your paper bills, invoices, and receipts. We recommend using a shared space to upload pictures of your files to keep them digitally. Google Drive, Dropbox, and Sharefile are all platforms that provide the necessary storage you need to go paperless. These files can be shared and accessed from any device with a login, making it easy for your bookkeeper or accountant to find pertinent files without needing to dig through a filing cabinet. 

4. A receipt management system

If you have employees working on behalf of your family who have the authority to use credit cards linked to your bank account, you must set clear boundaries. We recommend establishing spending limits for each employee and linking your bank account to Ally. This software organizes your receipts from multiple members of your staff without sacrificing your time and energy. These receipts can easily align with other management software like Quickbooks to provide checks and balances for those with authority to spend on your behalf.

5 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a Bookkeeper

5 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a Bookkeeper

We believe you started your business out of a place of passion and to meet a need in your community. As a small business owner, you likely wear many hats, juggling your time between owner, human resources director, marketing manager, and accountant, to name a few. Your time is valuable, but in light of all of your job titles, time never seems to be in abundance. Due dates loom, tasks pile up, details are overlooked, and stress begins to consume you. The solution? Delegate. Here are five signs it’s time to look for an outsourced bookkeeper so you can get back to dreaming and growing your business.

1. Receipts and bills are stacking up 

Is your desk becoming overgrown with bills and receipts? Does the paperwork feel like it never ends? Organizing your books can be discouraging when you are drowning in financial data. It becomes even more difficult if your business did not set up a proper system for bookkeeping from the beginning. Without a standardized approach, maintaining your books can be burdensome. Your employees rely on you for accurate and timely payroll and budgeting.

Organized books are critical for profit-loss statements, financial planning, and budgeting. Cloud-based tools like Quickbooks will make it easy to keep tabs on your finances without the mountain of papers on your desk. Don’t let those receipts get the best of you; hiring a professional bookkeeper can help. 

2. Tax-prep is stressful and overwhelming 

Does tax season stimulate anxiety? You took the right step in hiring a Certified Public Accountant to file your taxes, but tax preparation is still required. Someone needs to run reports, apply updated tax codes, and categorize paperwork. Doing this on your own can be intimidating. While financially savvy and experienced, your CPA is not involved in the ins and outs of daily business and doesn’t know what papers you filed where or how your business runs cash-flow through the weeks and years.

CPAs don’t typically do tax preparation, and it will require much more time, money, and communication to find all of the documents and data they need. Outsourcing all your business’s tax prep to a bookkeeper can alleviate the oppressiveness of tax season by streamlining communication with your CPA and increasing your confidence that your taxes will be filed correctly.

3. Financing is necessary for growth

Is your company looking to grow? Do you need additional financing options? For more financing, you must have organized and accurate financial data. Banks will evaluate your business on the organization of its financial records, debt repayment history, and reputation. By hiring a bookkeeper to execute financial tasks, your business will have a greater opportunity for increased lending. In doing so, you can know your profit and loss statements will be timely and accurate when submitting paperwork to a bank. If you need additional documentation, your bookkeeper is a call away. Don’t let approvals get in the way of your organization’s growth.

4. Every penny counts 

If you’re a small business owner, you know that every penny matters. Unanticipated fees and additional expenses are simply not an option. Avoiding unwanted costs is a must, and cash flow management is essential to running a successful business. By hiring a bookkeeper, your company avoids the risk of audits and late fees. In addition, bookkeepers can facilitate a more efficient business on your behalf by appropriately entering all information for your taxes, which saves money in the long run. Get back to looking at the big financial picture, let the bookkeepers handle the pennies. 

5. Dreaming for your business has become stagnant  

You didn’t go into business for the endless bills, crinkled receipts, and math homework. You became a business owner because you had a dream: a desire to change and serve your community and to build time and financial freedom. We believe you deserve to have the time and energy to focus on your goals and see them come to fruition. A professional bookkeeper grants you the mental space to be inspired again by maintaining the areas of your business that drag you down. Get back to dreaming, hire a bookkeeper.

You are one of your business’s most valuable assets.

By delegating the bookkeeping to a professional team like System Six, you regain time, energy, money, and most importantly, the space to grow your business. Are you interested in taking the next step to finding a trustworthy and dependable bookkeeper? Let’s chat. At System Six, we help business owners get back to what’s important, one line item at a time.

Basics of Outsourced Church Bookkeeping: Part 3

Basics of Outsourced Church Bookkeeping: Part 3

Welcome to the final part of our three part series on bookkeeping and finance specific to churches.  This third part of the series covers budgeting.  Just like I mentioned in part two, I recommend reading the previous parts (on Helpful Tools and Program Spending) of the series since this final edition of the series builds on what was previously covered.

In part three we will be discussing budgeting and the various aspects of the process to consider while walking your clients through building a budget.

Budgeting Philosophy

The biggest challenge to budgeting is making sure that the appropriate people are involved in the process.  Usually the primary champion of the budgeting process is whoever is sitting in the board treasurer or church operations role.  Unfortunately, this most often ends up as the only person that cares about having a budget.

It may seem simplistic, but it’s important to start with the basics: “What is a budget?”  Throughout my years of helping with budgets, and even working on my own household budget, I have learned that a budget is a plan for how to spend money.  With a church, that money belongs to the churchgoers who donated those funds.  In a church, a budget is a plan for how to spend other people’s money and that plan should support the ministry goals and objectives of the church.

Who Should Make the Budget?

Since these ministry goals and objectives are often discussed and set by church leadership, a budget should support those goals.  Because of this it is vitally important that other members of leadership contribute to, or assist with budgeting.  In most cases, pastors and lay leaders are not financially minded so their natural inclination is to avoid the budgeting process altogether.  In their minds that is the reason they hired or appointed an operations or finance director.

As outsourced bookkeepers and consultants, the goal here is to advise our church clients that the budget committee should consist of ministry leaders, operations staff, and ministers.  During the process the question of “Does this budget support the ministry goals and objectives of our church?” should be at the forefront of everyone’s minds, and the committee consists of all the right people that can answer that question.

The Mechanics of a Balanced Budget

Now that all the right people are at the table, it’s okay for the operations and financially minded leaders to lead the process.  The best place to start is with income.

Income for a church can be a challenge due to the following:

  • How many church attenders are giving?
  • Will those church attenders continue to give at the rate they are giving?
  • If the church is growing, how much will the revenue grow?
  • If the church is getting smaller, are the people leaving regular givers?
  • Of the people leaving, how much are they giving?
  • Is there a plan to encourage increased giving in the upcoming period?

In part two of this series some of the donor management and church management tools that I listed can help to answer these questions.  Other questions are better answered by pastors and ministry leaders, which is why it’s important that they are involved in the process.

Once all these questions are answered it’s important that the revenue budget is set based on practical expectations and not on the amount that is desired.  The revenue can be divided evenly across all twelve months of the year, or allocated differently to each month based on previous year giving trends.  If using the latter method, make sure that the monthly cash flow can handle particular months where expenses may exceed revenue.  This situation may arise since most expenses are the same month-to-month, but monthly revenue can fluctuate. Once revenue is determined, expenses naturally follow.

The first pass through expenses can be accomplished without looking at revenue, and based only on the needs of the church and ministries.  It’s important that expenses are then compared to the overall projected revenue.  If total expenses exceed total revenue for the year, that means the church likely can’t accomplish everything that it wants to that year.  This is again why it is important to have a budget committee made up of ministry leaders and pastors because at this point, hard decisions will have to be made about where to reduce expenses.  These decisions should be guided by the ministry goals of the church, and if expenses are cut in certain areas, it’s a collective decision instead of a financial director simply moving numbers around on a spreadsheet.

At the end of the process the difference between total expenses and total income ideally should be zero. If expenses exceed revenue, that means there will be an expected cash burn (disregarding any balance sheet considerations).  If revenue exceeds expenses, there is the potential that the extra money can be put towards a reserve for future savings.

Bookkeeping to Serve the Church

As stated earlier, budgeting is important and because it is important, needs to involve many stakeholders.  Since churches are made up of many people, many people should be involved.  In our role as trusted advisors we can encourage the churches we are serving in this direction.  

Since this wraps up the three part series on outsourced church bookkeeping, our hope is that we have helped to provide clarity on some of the potential pitfalls of serving churches.  The intention is that this will help to increase the value that we are providing, and ensure the success of the churches and non-profit ministries we are serving.

If you are an outsourced bookkeeper looking for further ideas, or a church that is in need of outsourced bookkeeping, we are glad to serve, and we can be reached at hello@systemsix.com.