By Gina Calvert

The Giving System that Speaks Your Church Accounting Software’s Language

This is part 2 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.

The Challenge of Integrating Giving with Church Accounting Software

One of the most frustrating church back office tasks is transferring data to your church accounting software. With most giving platforms, it takes too many manual tasks.

To help us put this problem into perspective, meet Laila Vanderpool. She is Finance Director of Life Church in Wesley Chapel, Florida, a 7-campus church (2 domestic, 5 international).

Laila inherited an overly complex finance back-office using 7 different software applications. Contribution management was fraught with redundancies and inconsistencies. She immediately set about to create efficiency.

The Vision2 Solution

Laila believes that systems that don’t speak the same (accounting) language cause the majority of inefficiencies that plague financial teams. You know the drill: Your ChMS or giving systems output giving data into a spreadsheet full of extensive transactional data. Then you have to the review and manually format the data to match your accounting system’s structure. Then you have to upload and post it to your accounting system.

But Vision2 cleanly maps giving data to your accounting system’s structure. Data flows automatically and accurately in without manual processes. Our unique subledger feature means that we handle all transactions in a deliberate, pure, auditable way, just like your accounting system does it. So your GL entries seamlessly match what is entered into your accounting system.

“It’s really great that Vision2 is able to give me files and output that looks like what’s in my Quickbooks,” Laila said. “I’m able to easily confirm the validity of the information and integrity of the numbers. I never had that with our previous online giving.”

RESULTS

By creating a fully integrated 3-platform system (Vision2, Quickbooks and PCO), Laila was able to:

  • Reduce intake processing from up to 7-10 hours each week down to 2-3 hours.
  • Save tens of thousands of dollars by eliminating an expensive third-party accounting team and repurposing the responsibilities of two part-time employees, despite tremendous growth.
  • Move into a true CFO role where she could focus on strategy and stewardship, not simply contribution processing.

Hear Laila describe her back office’s “whirlwind transformation” with Vision2.

Other blogposts in this series: