By Gina Calvert

Can Your Giving System Automate Both Online and Offline Giving?

This is part 4 in our How to Bring Your Church Back Office to the Future series. You can start with Part 1 or download our guide in PDF form to get all the steps at once.

Online giving has evolved a lot in its 20+ year history. At first, checks and ACH were the only form of gifts that could be processed via a giving platform. Then credit and debit quickly became an option. Some platforms now manage stock and other non-monetary gifts. But until recently, no one had bridged the gap between online and offline giving – checks, cash and money orders.

The significant pain of processing offline gifts

For large churches, processing cash and check gifts can be quite time-consuming. For example, before becoming a Vision2 client, it took 17 people 4 days to process the Saddleback Church offering each week.

We asked Laila Vanderpool, CFO of 7-campus Life Church about her experience with offline giving.

Laila had inherited a complex back office using 7 different software applications into the future. “It was a nightmare having to make multiple scans to get cash and check transactions into each of my systems,” she said. “We used to scan checks once for remote deposit, then we’d rescan checks and cash twice, once into our ChMS and once into our accounting system.”

How Does Offline Gift Processing Help?

For Laila, the difference was like night and day: “With Vision2, we eliminated triple scanning. It’s incredible how easily we now scan checks and envelopes just once.”

Vision2 enables Saddleback to complete their offering processing in a matter of hours with just a few people.

Vision2’s embedded scanner provides unparalleled check scanning speed and accuracy for all kinds of checks (money orders, traveler’s checks, personal and business checks) and cash envelopes.

One scan enters all your giving data into our system, where we quickly transfer your funds to your bank and send the information to your ChMS (reported at the campus level). We automate every point of the gift’s lifecycle, including NSFs, chargebacks and bank files, and reconcile your giving to the penny every day.

How much time could your finance team recoup with single scanning of cash and checks?

Other blogposts in this series:

To learn more about Vision2, schedule a demo today.