#CHURCH EXPENSE REPORT TEMPLATE FULL#
#CHURCH EXPENSE REPORT TEMPLATE DOWNLOAD#

The church pays for the exact cost of their pastors’ benefits. How could someone listening to me for thirty minutes hope to understand it?įor the Global Methodist Church, the benefits plans are transparent.

#CHURCH EXPENSE REPORT TEMPLATE FULL#

After I was done, someone said something to the effect: “I like your excitement in giving the report, but I don’t think you were speaking in English.” Was I trying to hide information? I hope not, but the pension plan was so full of acronyms and intricate details that took me about four years to understand.

In a denomination I previously worked for, I remember giving a report on the state of the pension plan. If something is overly complicated, it is difficult to be transparent. If there isn’t trust, obviously, information will be hidden.

Transparency often relies on simplicity and trust. The model for Connectional Funding seems to reciprocate that trust. This shows the trust churches are placing in the Global Methodist Church. Many of the churches have paid a high price to leave their former denomination and become Global Methodist. The Global Methodist Church does not have a way to verify that the amount is correct and must trust the local church. Instead, the church reports how much it owes and pays accordingly. The church doesn’t receive a monthly bill. It is clear that the IRS doesn’t trust taxpayers, and taxpayers are very wary of the IRS.įor Connectional Funding, the church uses minimal instructions to calculate its own amount. The IRS also double checks your answers with your employer or anyone else that paid you. To help you answer this question, the IRS issues thousands of pages of instructions, which also act as a bludgeon if you make a mistake. Each year, the IRS asks every American this basic question: How much money did you make? Your taxes are a percentage of that amount. There is a tendency for bureaucrats to view the people they serve are incompetent or corrupt. I’ve worked in bureaucratic institutions for most of my career. Overall, you can see that the Global Methodist Church values simplicity. Although this last one is a little more complicated, it is fairly simple for a retirement plan. The formula for retirement is probably the most complicated because it depends on whether or not the pastor lives in a parsonage and how much the pastor is personally contributing. The formula for health insurance looks up the amount depending on how many people are covered. The formula for Connectional Funding is simple addition and multiplication. Sometimes they would ask how a certain formula works, and I would have to admit that I must have been smarter back then because it was far too complicated for me to understand now. When I taught Accounting at Dakota Wesleyan University, I would share some of my favorite spreadsheets with my students. From creating this spreadsheet, here is what I would suggest are the underlying values behind Global Methodist finances. Not only do you have to understand the details and logic of the particular problem, but you also develop a sense for the underlying values.

#CHURCH EXPENSE REPORT TEMPLATE DOWNLOAD#

Feel free to download and improve upon this spreadsheet or, if you made your own, send it to me at learn a lot when you create a spreadsheet. Because of the tax implications of clergy compensation, I’m not sure how well I succeeded. The challenge with this particular spreadsheet was to make it precise without being overly complicated. I actually have a library of my favorite spreadsheets of all time. I sometimes joke that Excel is my first language.

The links to the spreadsheet and other information are below the video. In the video below, I demonstrate the Excel spreadsheet. It was so well done that it inspired me to create my own calculator using Microsoft Excel. The other day, I was on the Eastern Texas Conference’s website when I noticed their beautiful online calculator which helps churches calculate the cost of Connectional Funding as well as their pastors’ health and retirement benefits.

Church expense report template