AcctTwo Blog

Good leadership matters. As an organization, your emotional intelligence is vital to the church leadership succession planning process. People work for people. “People are definitely a company’s greatest asset,” says Mary Kay Ash, CEO of Mary Kay cosmetics. “It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.” I think back to every organization that I’ve ever been in or a part of and that sentiment is so true. People are so important. Relationships with people are what bind us, especially in faith-based organizations when our focus is on the good work we do with people and spreading the word of the Lord. Faith-based employees are stewards of the organization, no matter which role they are in.

According to Neal Joseph in Outcomes Magazine, “Leadership challenges now require an extra something that is often intangible. We tend to hire people to solve ‘technical’ problems in our organizations, when in fact many organizational issues that result from working in a post-modern cultural context require adaptive, not technical leadership.”

Last week we hosted a webinar with Vanderbloemen that talked about effective financial leadership and preparing well for 2021 to help you avoid church financial problems. It is such an important topic for the churches we work with – especially learning to serve in this new post-pandemic world.

AcctTwo’s Head of Nonprofit, Allison Webb, was the latest guest on Ministry Architects’ webinar: “How to Be More Confident in Your Church Finances for 2021”. Allison and Jeff Dunn-Rankin, Ministry Architects’ Executive Vice President, talked about how to make fiscally wise decisions for your church finance digital transformation in 2021.

The purpose of succession planning is to have a plan in place when someone within your organization leaves. This could be a career change, retirement, or an immediate life altering situation. Most of the time you can’t predict what’s going to happen, so having a succession plan in place can help work through the chaos when something unexpected happens. Deloitte reports that while 86 percent of leaders believe leadership succession planning is an “urgent” or “important” priority, only 14 percent believe they do it well. Similar to buying accounting software, succession planning is a function that you only do a handful of times in your career. It is realistic to feel that you don’t do it well if you don’t do it often.

Nonprofit Succession Planning Best Practices - If You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail

A few months ago we started researching nonprofit succession planning and how that impacts the faith-based back-office. Being in the finance and accounting world, we've seen some great examples and some not so great examples of succession planning for finance and accounting professionals. This led to months of research that turned into many conversations with succession planning experts and members of our own team who have lived it. It became a passion project for many of us. We even published an eBook about it! What became clear was, in order to be successful, you need to plan for success.

If You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail is the first section of the eBook. Over the next couple of months, we will release more sections on our blog. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did creating it.

Sage Intacct Release 3 for 2020 is live and we are here to give you an overview of the new features you rely on to make your job easier. In Release 3, Sage Intacct is delivering automation and streamlining processes around credit card transactions and reconciliations, cross-entity allocations, and budgeting and planning. These are just a handful of what's new in the 2020 Sage Intacct Release 3.

AcctTwo’s Head of Nonprofit, Allison Webb, is the latest guest on the Christian Nonprofit CFO’s podcast, hosted by David Beroth.

David’s podcast focuses on enhancing the stewardship of church finances with increased CFO insight and expanding ministry impact. Church financial software for financial leaders in ministry are often ill-equipped to address, let alone overcome, the many challenges they face. Too often they pivot from crisis to crisis. In this mode they run on the tactical treadmill instead of proactively contributing strategic value to their nonprofits. Unfortunately, the full impact of their ministry suffers without the right Christian accounting software. Proverbs 19:20: “Listen to advice and accept instruction, that you may gain wisdom in the future.”

A few months ago, at our Faith-Based Finance Collaborative, AcctTwo's Managed Accounting Services Controller, Shelly Einspahr, and Covenant Church's COO, Brian Coleman, sat down and talked about how we work together. Little did we know back at the end of February, our world was going to change dramatically in a matter of weeks. The news about COVID-19 was still somewhat sparse, mainly impacting China, Italy, and starting to creep into California – specifically around San Francisco. Churches went from serving thousands to having to pivot and become virtual. In fact, the whole world had to pivot and become remote. Figuring out how all the pieces fit together and how to maintain business-as-usual was a challenge. Even for organizations that have had cloud-based infrastructure in place, it was still challenging at times because most of us went from working 9-to-5 to working 24/7 which included, parenting and homeschooling.

Recently we sponsored and attended the Texas Ministry Conference in Houston, Texas. The vision of the Texas Ministry Conference is to provide tools and resources for people in all types of ministry and ministry support.

Last week marked our 5th annual Faith-Based Finance Collaborative. This year our client, Concord Church of Dallas, hosted us in their beautiful facility. We are blessed with so many amazing clients and partners.