Guest Post – Forecasting Annual Church Revenues: Using Trends and Cycles to Help Predict Future Revenues – part 1

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.

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Jim Ulvog

Brief summary of rules for recording donated services

Check out post from Colette Kamps, CPA for a great summary of the rules for recording donated services:  To Record or Not Record Donated Services. 

There are specific rules for when an NPO can record revenue for services that have been donated. It is not optional. If the specific requirements are met, then the donated services must be recorded.

Jim Ulvog

4,000 years of history in 1 chart – superb visualization

Think you could map out the history of the world over the last 4,000 years, showing the relative power of all the major governments and people groups, and then put all that info into one chart?

John B. Sparks did just that back in 1931. His five-foot-long chart can be seen at Slate – The Entire History of the World – Really, All of It – Distilled Into a Single Gorgeous Chart.

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Jim Ulvog

Unintended consequences – “Your help is hurting,” government to government version

Previous post described how development aid can sometimes cause hurt.

Part 2 of that discussion describes how government-to-government aid can sometimes make things worse and prevent development.

Jerry Bowyer interviews Peter Greer in Your Help Is Hurting, Part II: The Unintended Consequences Of Giving Dictators Foreign Aid.

Mr. Greer uses the example of the president of Zimbabwe distributing food received as a part of international aid only in the areas that vote for him.

Want to eat? Vote for him. Want to oust the dictator? Your family and community starve.

Not quite what was intended when governments approved the grant.

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Jim Ulvog

Q: What are a few problems with the ban on political activity by charities?

A:

  • Selective enforcement of the law with a few charities losing exempt status while hundreds of others intentionally flout the law with no enforcement.
  • Vague meaning of what is allowed or not
  • That vague meaning chills free speech for everyone.
  • Probably unconstitutional (I watch constitutional debates on the field from the nosebleed section of the stadium, but looks to me like the political ban is way out-of-bounds).
  • Adopted into law in 1954 as payback against an NPO that dared criticize a Senator from Texas.
  • Contrary to very long tradition of political expression in some faith communities.
  • Undermining respect for the law when strong enforcement effort is applied to a few select charities.

Those are a few reasons the Commission on Accountability and Policy for Religious Organizations believes the ban on political advocacy by charities should be substantially relaxed.

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Jim Ulvog

Unintended consequences – generous gift to local church undermines their giving

Mark Williams tells of a giving a generous offering when he was blessed to be the guest preacher at a church in India – Do You Destroy Through Dependency?

What he did not expect was his graciousness hurting the congregation.

How did that happen?

He gave two $20 bills.

Seems like a reasonable amount, doesn’t it? Yet he explains: (more…)

Jim Ulvog

Improved self-governance is key to development in Africa

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.

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Jim Ulvog

Unintended consequences – “Your help is hurting”

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.

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Jim Ulvog

Article on GIK valuation in Journal of Accountancy

“Gifts-in-kind: What are they worth? How to avoid pitfalls of GIK valuation” discusses the difficulties in valuing GIKs. The article is available online from the Journal of Accountancy.

The author is Jennifer Brenner, CPA, who is the associate director for financial accounting and operations for World Vision.

I heartily recommend the article to you.

I’ll wait a few days before posting my comments.

Jim Ulvog

GIKS – More difficult for Small NPOs – and why accurate valuations are so tough to come by!

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. Here is Jeff’s second guest post:

By Jeff Beaumont, CPA

Valuing gifts-in-kind is not an easy task. Nor is it quick.

There are not-for-profit organizations that appear to be aggressive with GIKs valuations – a quick internet search will reveal that truth. Not convinced? Ask the IRS for their opinion. Then there are others that take whatever value they can find because they lack the capability – they don’t have the know-how.

This post was written with smaller organizations in mind as they usually do not have the expertise, capacity, and staffing to the extent of their larger brethren.

To record GIKs, it seems there are three choices for management (and, by extension, the auditors) on reporting values: (more…)

Jim Ulvog

12 situations when it might matter to you that the Feds are tracking everything you text or email and making note of everywhere you go.

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…)

Jim Ulvog

What do you do if your cloud-based mission critical application is down for an indefinite time? Illustration from a reader for RSS feeds.

Update: The Old Reader back up at end of work day Thursday – that makes 1 1/2 days of the weekend and 4 workdays it was down.

Your tech provider may go off-line for an indefinite time. Another reason not to let your technology hold you captive.

The Old Reader went down around lunchtime on Saturday, 7-20, and isn’t back up just before lunch on Wednesday, 7-24. That’s four days – most of the weekend and one-half of a work-week. No public estimate when it will return.

Don’t be held captive by your technology.

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Jim Ulvog

Telemarketing pays off in the long run? Time for some evidence, part 2

In previous post, I said we need more examples to illustrate that charities can accelerate their revenue through a major, sustained telemarketing campaign beyond what they would have done otherwise.

I mentioned one anonymous illustration supporting the idea and three weak counter illustrations.

Three more counter-examples

I’ve looked at the American’s Worst Charities data quite a few times. Each time I get the impression that these long-running telemarketing campaigns are not doing what such efforts are supposed to be doing, specifically, generating a lot of new money over a long-term horizon.

After thinking about the previous two articles together, I decided to do a little analysis.

My small sample confirmed my previous observation – the campaigns are generating small amounts of new funds.

I picked a haphazard starting point, #10 on the list, and pulled data for the next three charities.

Here’s what I see.

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Jim Ulvog

Telemarketing pays off in the long run? Time for some evidence, part 1.

One of the reasons cited for charities to make heavy use of telemarketing in spite of the high cost is that with a sustained campaign a charity will grow substantially more than it would otherwise. By incurring heavy costs up front, the charity will have far more money for mission in a few years.

As a concept, I agree.

However, it is time for more than one or five anecdotes.

One anonymous example supporting the concept

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Jim Ulvog

5 tips for taking a tax deduction when helping your favorite charity involves travel

Several readers of this blog have asked questions about taking deductions for travel while helping a charity. Volunteers at your NPO are probably asking the same questions.  Some tips from IRS Summertime Tax Tip 2013-05 might help.

You might want to make this available to volunteers of your organization. The quoted text is from the IRS, so it is in the public domain: (more…)

Jim Ulvog