Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.
He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog.
By Jeff Beaumont, CPA
Would it be helpful to more thoroughly understand incoming church attendees, their giving, and if they feel accepted, welcomed, and a part of the local church family? This post will explore analyzing how long it takes for someone to give as a means to understand the newcomers.
About tracking trends, there are some considerations we need to ponder. When someone first shows up at church, they rarely give the first day. If they do give, they rarely would give their “normal” amount unless they felt part of the church, as if they had some sort of relationship or ownership.
Mark Williams shares the amazing story of his grandfather. What an encouragement to all of us to persevere in the midst of life’s trials.
The ship carrying his grandfather to the new world, the S.S. Norge, sank crossing the Atlantic in 1904. Eskild Alfred Eskildsen helped women and children get into the lifeboats. When the boats were full, he helped get life jackets on the remaining women and children.
When the ship was about to go under, he got a life jacket and swam out to the furthest boats. Why?
Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.
He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog. This is the fourth post in a series.
By Jeff Beaumont, CPA
Part 4– Final thoughts
Introduction is here. Description of forecasting model is here. Calculations discussed here.
Okay, once the research is complete, we can put together a fair and reasonably accurate estimation of tithes and offerings for budgeting for next year.
Next, the smell test. I have learned the necessity of this. So if the model says next year will increase by 5-10%, I should look at what has happened in the past (at least with the past I won’t have to make any guesses since it already happened!).
Last week, August 28th, marked the third blogiversary of my lead blog.
Many thanks to those who have stopped by to read. By now you have sensed that I’m having a blast in this blogging journey.
In celebration, I’d like to provide a few stats for my three main blogs. I realize my sites are infinitesimally small in the overall blogosphere. Yet I hope in some small way stats from a small site might be an encouragement to current bloggers and others thinking of jumping into the fun world of blogging.
Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.
He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog. This is the third in a series.
By Jeff Beaumont, CPA
Part 3 – Calculations
Introduction is here. Description of forecasting model is here.
You still with me?
Good.
Trying to figure out how to forecast revenue for nonprofits is quite a sticky issue. After all, it is much simpler to try to forecast revenue for a company that sells some product, say, bread, soda, or gasoline. There is a reasonable understanding that people need (or want) those items.
For a financial model, there is the term “financial driver” which means anything that affects the rise and fall of revenues, expenses, etc. The four categories for revenue drivers are: (more…)
The charity at the top of the America’s Worst Charities list compiled by the Tampa Bay Times, Center for Investigative Research and CNN, Kids Wish Network, is pushing back against the methodology. You can see the detail about the Times’ reporting on the charity here.
(This post will be a deep inside-baseball discussion.)
You can see the rebuttal here.
“The world is complicated.”
In a video from PovertyCure, Peter Greer tells the story I mentioned earlier of how in just one summer help from a U.S. church destroyed the egg market in a small Rwandan village.
Second hand clothes sent to Kenya destroyed the textile manufacturing industry and the cotton farms. Sad unintended consequences.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ii_k_AUqo8I&t=197]
Superb quote from the video: (more…)
Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.
He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog. This is the second in a series.
By Jeff Beaumont, CPA
Part 2 – Philosophy and foundation discussion
Introduction and encouragement to pastors is here.
We were forecasting revenue for the next year and knew we needed to be accurate. We needed to do our best to discern changes (be that attendance, economic changes, etc.) in the church that will affect revenue.
After the first year or two of using a flat percentage increase by looking at the past few years and trying to make a determination for the entire year’s revenue in under an hour (yes, that happens frequently in churches!), we realized our mistake to make it such a hasty and cursory decision-making process.
We then then took a different road. One that required more work but—hopefully—would be worth it in the end.
Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.
He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog. This is the first in a series.
By Jeff Beaumont, CPA
Introduction and encouragement to pastors
I found myself with a group of others only a couple of months before that church’s year-end was over to discuss the seemingly never-ending debate on how to set a budget. The good part, everyone agreed that expenses should be less than or match revenues. But then we needed to figure out revenue.
How do you determine that? I found myself holding in tension believing in faith that He will deliver what we need and, sometimes seen as “at odds”, being responsible and wise to take care of what we have been given. I was working in spreadsheets. I didn’t—still don’t!—know how to factor those concepts into budgeting. After all, God doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet.
That is the core point made by Dr. Mo Ibrahim on how to develop the economies of all 57 African countries. He explains his ideas at: Mo Ibrahim On How (And Why) Africa Should Solve Its Own Problems.
He wonders why African people are so poor. He thinks of where Ghana, Egypt, China, India, and Singapore were 50 years ago. Then, Ghana and Egypt were the richest countries of those five. Look how far the other three have advanced.
The problem is bad governance in both the public and private sectors.
How would you like this to be your legacy on the missions committee?
After the genocide in Rwanda, your church decides to help the village by providing eggs to everyone. Great idea, right?
Absolutely.
You help for a while and then you sense God is leading you to help in another area now that things are settling down in Rwanda.
Cool, right?
Sure.
Unfortunately, what you didn’t realize is there was an entrepreneur who had bought some hens and sold eggs in the community. He was growing his business and providing food to more and more people.
No business can compete with free, so when you started helping with your ministry of giving away eggs, his business went under. He moved on to another business so he could feed his family.
When you pulled out of the town, there were no eggs. That protein was unavailable.
Not so great.
Not so cool.
You drove out of business the guy who was previously meeting local needs and then you disrupted the food supply.
You left the community in more distress than when you first arrived.
Recent news reports indicate federal intelligence agencies are gathering up a lot more information than we knew. That data is available to undisclosed lists of unknown people and will be retained for a very long time.
So what?
Here’s just a few circumstances in which you might not want access to your data by a long list of unidentified persons from various federal, state, or local agencies who were granted access to various unidentified parts of the various databases: (more…)
Thanks to all who fight for and defend our freedom. My time on active duty didn’t involve any of the things on this list. No one ever shot at me. My duty was so easy compared to this.
My gratitude goes to those who have returned and those still in the field. A big thanks to the 50 million who have served over the last 237 years.
WHEN A SOLDIER COMES HOME
When a soldier comes home, he finds it hard….
..to listen to his son whine about being bored.
The ranking approach used by the Tampa Bay Times in their “America’s Worst Charities” articles is focusing on the high fees paid to telemarketers rather than just the overhead ratio. One of the threads of the online discussions is that their methodology is just focused on overhead ratios.
That is not the case. The overhead ratio conversation is a separate issue. The Tampa Bay Times approach focuses on the high cost of telemarketing as a fundraising technique and the issues related to that industry.
The reporters outlined their approach in a separate article here.
As I looked at bits and pieces of the data, I noticed several of the charities had respectable program ratios, so I decided to poke at the data.