Playing a major role in streamlining business operations, accountability is a factor that has embarked into every sphere of human lives. While churches are essentially present to provide spiritual guidance to visitors, the maintenance and recordkeeping of various expenditures such as volunteer activities, sponsored events, and camps are crucial to smooth functioning. Requiring a considerable amount of dedication and time, expense reporting becomes cumbersome for the church leaders and volunteers. While some churches rely on their administrative staff to record daily expenses, others utilize volunteer support. As the basic job of church management is to transform society according to Jesus Christ’s way of life, expense reporting solutions come into play to report, control, and reconcile expenses. Expense reporting solutions not only monitor expenses but also provide an accessible database to church members to boost accountability at every level.
Let’s dig into this guide on how to select expense reporting solutions for churches.
All You Need to Know About Expense Reporting
With all the spiritual awakening that takes place in holy places, one has to make sure the team abides by the rules and maintains the decorum of churches. Expense report management solutions manage the array of day-to-day expenses that require proper bookkeeping. In this article, we will shed light on all the major aspects of expense reporting solutions.
What Are Expense Reporting Solutions?
Being a part of a system that brings stability to people’s lives, would you want your church to go through unstable times? Whether you are running a business, non-profit organization, or church, exceeding your financial budget can bring uncertainty and disorder to your future operations. Expense reporting solutions are management software that tracks business expenditures and records them for bookkeeping.
With an error rate of 19% in expense reporting, expense reporting solutions overshadow manual reporting by providing precise reports. By accessing and reviewing an expense report, churches gain a holistic view of their financial resources and find out ways to streamline budget and cash requirements.
Why do Churches Need Expense Reporting?
While expense management might sound completely unrelated to holy places, you would never want to neglect this aspect to boost your church’s reliability in your community. Churches and NGOs in the USA receive a whopping amount of $50 billion annually in the form of charity and donations. Although donors participate in such activities to help the community and master the art of giving, they surely need to know if their money is being invested in the right causes.
Do you expect the church leaders to manage day-to-day affairs, cash inflow, and expenditure on their own? It would be a grave mistake to rely on a single person to carry out all the necessary operations of a church as it might lead to erroneous judgment and uneven assignment of financial resources. Churches need to incorporate expense report management solutions to boost their credibility and maintain accountability within their systems.
The Benefits of an Expense Reporting Solution
- Elimination of Errors
No matter how skilled human resources are, there is always room for errors when it comes to manual reporting. Automated expense reporting software eliminates errors from the expense reports and increases accuracy. By identifying duplication in the data entry processes, reporting solutions ensure error-free reporting.
- Increase in Automation
Which church would want to wait for weeks to record and reconcile daily expenditures? In this fast-paced world, church reporting should be conducted promptly. An expense management solution automates expense tracking and approval. Your administrative staff can focus their energies to bring in more visitors and donations while the expense reporting solution ensures accurate reporting on all fronts.
- Guarantees Compliance
Practicing what you preach is extremely relevant in terms of church management. Churches being a symbol of purity, accountability, and truth should abide by all the laws and regulations. While human reporting takes effort to categorize expenses according to the state laws, automated reporting solutions create audits immediately that facilitate compliance. Check out this short church compliance checklist to ensure maximum compliance.
Essential Features of Expense Reporting Software
Make sure the expense reporting solution entails the following features before you sign up for their services.
- Real-Time Reporting
Getting to know about an unnecessary church expense way after it took place brings nothing but guilt and disappointment. An expense reporting solution should ensure real-time reporting to control spending and track the budget. DotNet Report provides an ad hoc reporting tool to churches that lists down their expenses in real-time and adds convenience to budget alignment.
- Easy-to-Use Interface
Not every church has technical specialists to operate complex reporting management tools. Always remember to sign up for a solution that offers user-friendly reporting tools and comprehensible features that facilitate effective reporting. Choose a self-service reporting solution such as DotNet Report that offers a set of built-in features that facilitate users at every level to create and edit their simplified reports with minimal technical expertise.
- Customer Support
Church management often overlooks the significance of customer support service provided by the reporting solution team. Whenever a church integrates a new software into its existing system, it requires complete support from the solution provider. To make the best use of your investment, always choose a reporting engine that will do more than just sell the software to your team.
At DotNet Report, we offer excellent customer service to our customers by providing customer support at every step of the sales process. Our customer support team gets in touch with the customers before the sale and remains active throughout the software’s lifetime.
The Top Expense Reporting Solutions
- DotNet Report
Simplifying church reporting at every level, DotNet Report is a self-service embeddable ad hoc reporting tool that lets users create their dashboard and easy-to-interpret reports. Our reporting engine adds value to the customer’s expense reporting systems and saves the IT department’s time by 30%.
Are you reluctant to sign up for expense reporting software due to the threats associated with third-party integrations? Choose DotNet Report and eliminate the need for external parties to manage your reporting requirements. Our multi-tenant client support ensures maximum privacy by restricting data access based on roles and users. With the outstanding features offered by DotNet Report, you will never regret your decision of signing up for our embeddable reporting software solution.
Features
- A self-service tool that requires little technical expertise.
- Built-in reports, graphs, and charts to visualize expenses easily.
- Customizable dashboards that enable you to layout reports in various formats.
- Open-source code to enable a smooth transition to high-quality reports.
- Report scheduler with automated email schedules.
You can get all these features and more in the following packages.
Packages
- Open (free trial version)
- Premium ($85/month)
- Premium ($165/month)
- Enterprise ($635/month)
By choosing DotNet Report, you will not have to wait for months to set up your reporting tool. Our installation process takes up to three weeks to release a customer report application. Unlike other expense reporting tools in the market, DotNet Report’s technical support begins with the free-trial period to provide technical assistance as soon as the customer decides to assess our services. Gain an eagle-eye view of all our offerings during the free trial and make your decision accordingly.
2. Certify
A fusion of top expense management tools, Certify empowers employees to monitor, track, and control their expenses through its automated software solution. It offers an easy-to-use mobile application to its users that facilitates reporting and compliance control.
Features
- Supports 140+ currencies and 64 languages.
- Built-in controls to facilitate compliance with laws and regulations.
- Automated and secure vendor payments.
- Actionable dashboards to optimize expenses.
- Scheduled report creation through ReportExecutive.
Sign up for Certify’s services for $8 per user per month and streamline your expense tracking requirements. Users have to pay some additional charges to avail of ACH reimbursements.
3. Expensify
An all-in-one solution for paying bills, tracking expenses, maintaining records, and generating invoices, Expensify is a pre-accounting and expense management solution. Meeting the accounting requirements of medium to large-scale organizations, churches can avail of Expensify’s services if they have a large team or complex expenditures.
Features
- Single click scanning immediately scans your receipts to capture all the necessary expenses.
- Tax tracking feature to sync current or customized tax rates for your church’s expense policies.
- Limited access based on user role guarantees data protection and privacy.
- Credit card import gathers credit card transactions to automate receipt creation and merging.
Pricing
- Free ($0/month)
- Collect (begins at $5/user/month)
- Control (begins at $9/user/month)
We recommend you sign up for the seven-day free trial version before purchasing the solution to gain an insight into its offerings.
Choose the expense reporting solution for your church by analyzing its features and pricing packages. Always sign up for the free trial version before you purchase a solution to walk through the software’s services. DotNet Report offers technical assistance and responsive customer services to resolve your queries within 24 hours during the free trial period. Schedule a demo with our team to gain an insight into our solutions and see how our highly skilled experts streamline your reporting processes.
