If you are a Pastor or even an active member of a church, you should know by now that proper financial planning is essential.
Hence, proper planning and monitoring your budget is the key to identifying wasteful expenses. Doing this will help you adjust better to the different fluctuations in giving, and eventually help you set feasible financial goals, even for your online church. The clarity that creating a strong budget gives will always have a ripple effect.
Sometimes, some pastors are usually in a fix about getting started in creating an online church budget. And that’s okay. We have highlighted some starting points to make your budget planning easier. These tips not only work for your online church, but they can also work for your physical church.
1. Assess Previous Data
It is one of the best places to start, and it would help if you have good records. Carefully look over the previous few years of financial data to spot patterns in income and expenditure. If you have data for multiple years, you might want to study them; it helps you take a better perspective.
What areas have you expended the most funds? What’s the trend of your income like over the years? Do you detect an upward or downward trend? Either way, by how much? Did the percentages spent on different items and projects reflect your ministry priorities? Which areas need to be cut down or eliminated? Are there things you should kickstart? These critical questions will guide you on how to set budget goals for the year.
If you do not already use Church management software, you may find it challenging to obtain exact data on your church income; givings, and donations online. With ChurchPad, you can always get up-to-date or yearly financial data, set up recurring donations, and manage contribution types — all of which are essential for growing your church.
2. Set Goals For the Year Ahead
To maintain a meaningful, active, and vibrant budget, you need to set goals. Write down your goals and work towards hitting them.
Once you have set goals, it’s easy to monitor your online church budget. Identify what costs would hinder you from hitting your goal and reduce those costs.
3. Auditing Your Income
Once you have identified your income sources, you can begin to look at which ones are static and which ones you can work on. You should also make a note of any income source that may be temporary.
For example, if you have facilities that could be rented by another church or organization, that could constitute a source of income for your church.
4. Auditing Your Budget
After you’ve assessed previous data and made your inferences, you are probably now able to make the right decisions in planning your budget. You have also been able to see areas that could be streamlined or improved upon. An important thing is working your budget and ensuring that your income and expenses are still aligning.
Start by plugging in numbers into the items until the expenditures match your budgeted income. If you can’t make the numbers work, you may need to either cut out some of the expenses or raise your estimated amount.
It is recommended that you go over the items in your budget, at least once in a quarter, and see how you’re doing. Have you had some unplanned expenses? How did it affect the budgets for some other items? Or did you offset it with budget decreases elsewhere? Were you able to achieve the income target set? Or do you need to cut your budget back a bit?
With ChurchPad, developing both short- and long-term budgets couldn’t get easier as you can create unlimited contribution categories to track different types of giving.
Monitoring short-term budgets such as your monthly budget give you insight into ongoing expenditure and funds management. It helps you identify places where you’re spending unnecessarily and those you need to allocate more funds. Also, investing in software that can maximize your relationships and communications with your congregation can be helpful.
Pulling a church budget is quite easy, especially if you’re using a user-friendly Church management software for your online church activities. With ChurchPad, you can pull reports quickly and easily to see how you are doing.
