Are you looking at remodeling your church? It could be time to build a complete new church.
Renovations and new construction cost money that may exceed donations and offerings specifically set aside for such purposes.
This means that the church may have to go to a lender to get the financing that is still needed to complete a project.
A lender is going to want to see the financials of the church.
This means that you need to have a well tuned bookkeeping system.
Excel spreadsheets that cover everything from donations, income and expenses will not work.
In this day and age churches need to use an adequate bookkeeping software system.
We must also point out that you do not want to use just any bookkeeping software, but one that is designed for churches.
The management of church funds requires a program to do "fund accounting", which is different than what a business would do.
Another reason is that you need a good audit trail for the accounting process.
Using a program such as Quicken accounting makes it to easy to move funds around and jiggle accounts without making sure that they balance out to provide a sound audit trail.
Which could make is easier for a person to cover any financial misappropriations.
Churches also need to track other information such as giving against pledges; this is a feature that regular bookkeeping software will not have.
Church bookkeeping software also needs to track church and Sunday school attendance, keep membership information, and be able to differentiate between designated and non-designated funds.
Finally for reasons we specified in the beginning your church will probably need to go to the bank and borrow money.
The lender is going to want to see accurate well kept records.